


From Immortal to Mortal

by Velgamidragon



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Hellenistic Religion & Lore, Incarnations of Immortality - Piers Anthony
Genre: Bittersweet, Crossover, Curses, Death, Depressing, Double murder, Evil, F/M, Fate, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Ghosts, Good, Heaven, Hell, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Lots of Crying, Nature, Night, Original Character(s), Origins, POV Multiple, Pre-Canon, Purgatory, Reconciliation, Sad, Sisterly Love, This is not Happy, Time - Freeform, War, creation of Incarnations, only actual character from Incarnations of Immortality is JHVH, this whole thing is just power transferral
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-04-30 01:52:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14486235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Velgamidragon/pseuds/Velgamidragon
Summary: Before the Incarnations were powerful offices wielded by mortals, they were once the actual powers and livelihoods of immortal beings. This is when the transfer of power and immortality first began, in Greece from the first murdered Death to the complete reorganization of the Afterlife.





	1. Chronos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merfilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/gifts).



> I gift this work to Merfilly, even though it's not FULLY an Incarnations of Immortality work because of two reasons:
> 
> 1) Merfilly is one of the few people that has actually written for one of my favorite book series.
> 
> 2) They inspired me to contribute something to the Incarnations of Immortality fandom (even if it's in a sideways manner. Maybe I'll write a proper fic to contribute later).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I adore Incarnations of Immortality and Greek mythology, and getting back into Greek mythology with all these familiar names made me get back into Incarnations of Immortality again. It was hinted at in "For Love of Evil" (I think) that the original Incarnations were once immortal beings (like Nyx/Nox still) that simply gave up the power and immortality in favor of retirement since apparently eternity gets boring after a while. That was where this idea spawned from, BUT it doesn't mesh up nicely with the established canon of the Incarnations origin stories as explained later in "And Eternity", so take this with a grain of salt anyway.
> 
> It should be noted that unfortunately, this work is more connected with the places and offices of the Incarnations I know and love rather than the people with the exception of JHVH (and the brief mention of Samael in "For Love of Evil").

Chronos was a god, a primordial god or a protogenos as the Greeks would have called him, and he was the passage of time. He knew nothing else, not even how he came about and neither did anyone else. He had simply come into existence one day (day being an irrelevant concept at this point of time), without any of the other protogenoi’s intent or action. Chaos of Air, Gaea of Earth, Tartarus of the Below World, Eros of Procreation, and Chaos’s two children, Erebus of Darkness and Nyx of Night, had all been around then, but not one had an answer. In fact, they did not even seem to recognize his existence among them, not consciously anyway.

However, at the very moment of his… existence?... he had felt the presence of five other intangible, unformed powers. They felt… strangely similar to himself, like how he imagined siblings must relate and yet, he was distinctly apart from them somehow. The only other kinship he felt was with Nyx, but it was nowhere as strong as this. Before he could ponder over this unusual phenomenon further, they had quickly dispersed from his awareness and afterwards, he had not been certain he had even sensed them at all.

With his existence now, time passed, as was his wont and he observed the rise and fall of Uranus by the hands of his Titan sons. He saw the birth and creation of many spirits, daimones, and new personifications of existence by Nyx’s innumerable offspring. As more children were born of the protogenoi, Chronos saw the very nature of the world change and form with their existence becoming increasingly larger, more variable, and more complex.

Time continued and he saw the subsequent rise and fall of the Titans, their king having inherited his father’s curse and was brought down by the very children he had oppressed to protect himself from. Mortal bipedal creatures that resembled the Titans and the subsequent Olympians in form, called humans, were created by a Titan named Prometheus, who was their champion. Chronos was intrigued by them, though he had nothing to do with them. Unlike the protogenoi, the Titans, and the Olympians, their time was not infinite. It was limited. They felt the passage of their own time keenly and responded to this knowledge in many ways. Some were hopelessly reckless, choosing to make the most of their time even if their life ended young. Others strove to extend the limits of their time by any means possible, some even at the risk of losing what they already had. Yet others passed their time quietly, choosing to make the best of what they could of what was available to them. The innumerable ways that these mortal humans responded to the passage of their own limited times was endlessly fascinating to the god who had never before given a thought to consider what his very existence meant.

Then one otherwise-ordinary day (for days were a valid concept now), Chronos felt something unerringly familiar nearby and it abruptly recalled to mind the dusty memory of his earliest moments of existence. The five intangible presences like himself. He sought out the source and found himself in an empty green pasture with fields of spring wildflowers waving in the wind without end. There was no one around, but he had _felt_ the call, and he _still_ felt it. This was where he was supposed to be, at the _time_ to be.

And suddenly, he was no longer alone.

A figure appeared out of nowhere wrapped in a white cloak and holding a strange object that was like two see-through glass vases whose openings were like narrow tubes and fused together. Inside these baubles was off-white sand with only a few grains trickling down into the mostly full bottom. What stunned Chronos the most though was the aura of immortality emanating from this being. A god? He looked closer. No, it was a human, a mortal human who had somehow taken on the semblance of immortality. Chronos didn’t know what to make of it.

The man peered at him from beneath his hood and seemed just as startled as Chronos was to see him. Chronos, for his part, was not surprised by this. He had never had a human form and had never needed to assume one. He was merely a nebulous existence of congealed time.

“I see you? You’re early? But how and who…?” the man in the white cloak began, speaking a language Chronos didn’t know, yet somehow understood, but then sudden comprehension dawned on the man’s face and he trailed off, smiling. “Ah, I see. It’s fitting I suppose, that the beginning of time is also the end of time. I greet you, last and first Chronos.”

Chronos had to admit it was more than a little vexing to hear a mortal, divinely-gifted as he may be, speaking and seemingly understanding something about his very nature that Chronos didn’t comprehend at all. But he didn’t get the opportunity to ask. The strange device suddenly called all of his attention to it, focusing on the remaining sands slipping into the bottom, and Chronos knew instinctively that he had to grab that object before the last grain of sand fell. He lunged forward and his ‘hand’ (for lack of a better word) closed around one of the four pillars supporting the device’s roof and floor holding the glass in place.

He managed this _just_ as the last grain fell.

Just in time.

The white cloak suddenly wrapped around him and Chronos discovered it felt less like fabric and more like fine mist. It was like himself, impermeable and impenetrable. Power surged from the object in his hand throughout his whole body and it felt inexplicably like welcoming a part of himself home, but nothing was moving and he felt a soft whisper in his head telling him _Over… Over…_ Instinctively, he turned the object over and now the top part of the weird vase was full of sand with only a little very slowly trickling into the now mostly- _empty_ bottom. He wasn’t quite sure the significance of that yet, but beyond that, he felt that something was… different somehow. Something had changed since he had touched the object and turned it over, but he couldn’t tell if it was the world or himself.

He noticed that the wind was still blowing, but unlike earlier, the wild flowers were blowing _into_ the wind rather than away from it. He stared in incredulous amazement. How could this be so? Chronos realized the wind had also _not_ been blowing in eastward earlier, but westward, and they did not usually change their courses 180 degrees like that either. He was a god and a protogenos even, so it did not take him long to figure out what had happened. From the moment he had touched the sand device, his own perception of the world had changed. He was still moving forward, but forward for him now was backwards for the rest of the world. Chronos was now, essentially, living his life backwards, as the one who had given him the sand device must have done as he suspected the sand was counting down to the time he had left to pass on the sand device to the next person.

But there was no one else.

He was Chronos, the primordial god of the passage of time. There had _been_ no time before him. And suddenly, he understood what the other man had meant by his then-cryptic last words: _The beginning of time is also the end of time. I greet you, last and first Chronos._

Chronos would have cried or laughed or both if he wasn’t numb with shock. The irony of his situation was not lost on him. He was the god of the passage of time, casually amused by how humans coped with knowing their time was finite while believing himself beyond such limitations. How foolish, how _presumptuous_ he had been! Time was not infinite. Everything had a beginning and an ending and not even he was exempt from this limitation. He would not be able to see from this point on how the rest of the world’s future fared, for that was beyond his time. _Last and first Chronos…_ The man who he’d taken the sand device from must have been the previous Chronos, or the next one depending on which perspective one was looking at things. He, and probably many others before (or after) him had taken care of the future world in his place.

A future he was no longer a part of as Chronos began his doomed retreat back to the very beginning of time, to what was now the end of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that wasn’t depressing or anything. Nope, not at all. There is a separate primordial Chronos that exists in some Greek mythology. However, he’s only mentioned in Orphic Hymns and Nonnus, Dionysiaca and with a completely different protogenoi origin story that admittedly confused me, so I just stuck with the one I remembered best from Hesiod’s Theogeny. However, that meant I had to make him kind of an unknown, unacknowledged entity by the others. It gave me a chance to sorta meet halfway with the origins of the Incarnations established in “And Eternity” (I _am_ taking some artistic liberties here since this is a crossover fiction).
> 
> All that being said, primordial Chronos is different from the Titan King Cronus, despite very similar-sounding names and Cronus _also_ being a god of time, but only in the ‘destruction caused by the ravages of time’ kind of way, rather than just its normal passage and timing from what I’ve gathered. I guess a case could still be made for Titan Cronus being the original immortal Incarnation of Time, but I like this idea better.


	2. Gaea (Part 1)

Gaea was one of the first protogenoi at the beginning of existence when even time itself seemed infinite and non-existent. She is more than just old, she is ancient and has borne many children, comparable to the vast number mothered by Nyx, the daughter of her own sister protogenos, Chaos. She has lived through several ages, that of her husband, her children, and her grandchildren, and even instigated many of the great changes that occurred in those ages.

She incited her Titan sons to depose their father and only her youngest, Cronus had the wily ambition to agree to her ploy.

She then assisted her daughter Rhea in protecting her youngest son from being consumed by his father while still an infant. And so in this way, she enabled the curse that her husband had cast upon his son, that he too would be overthrown by his own son.

The effects of the curse came to pass and once more, the youngest son became king. Even then, she was not satisfied and sent both her other children, the Gigantes and Typhon separately, to humble her Olympian-bound descendants. However, her ploy had been unsuccessful and the Olympians persevered where previous generations had not. Her indignation and her fury had long since been spent and now she was feeling her age as an ancient one, feeling as weathered and weary as the mighty mountains that tracked along her vast body. The land was her body and the weather her emotions and the world had turned indefinitely in this way for more than the thousands of millennia that she knew had passed once time had come into existence and been given substance. Chronos was his name.

Something had happened to him a thousand years ago, and most of the time, he was imperceptible to her, but when she _did_ perceive him, he felt otherworldly, not like a protogenos at all, but like a being of her own body somehow inverted or backwards and even then, never like the same man. It made no sense to her, but she understood that somehow, the Chronos she had first known no longer traversed her world and he had been replaced by another, yet time still passed unbalked as it always had despite the change.

It was this knowledge that gave her the idea.

The power had been transferred, even without the entity who had created it.

She could do likewise. If even Time himself was not infinite, then neither was Gaea. She understood that better than most of her kind for her very body was _constantly_ changing. It was growing, aging, and dying all over in various phases. Some parts of her with lush with fertility then others were barren wastelands, and sometimes they reversed their course. Her body would continue to remain until it too, eventually died, but her mind had aged faster than her body and she no longer wished to be responsible for the dictation of her power over it. She wanted to rest.

The only question remaining was to whom she would bestow her impressive power upon. She would not allow any man to have it nor would she just randomly give it away to some mortal woman. Mortals had proven themselves far too fallible to be trusted with such power. No, she would bestow it upon an already-existing nature goddess of her own bloodline. That was the only logical course of action to take, for they had all proven themselves capable of understanding the very natures of their powers, all more finely-tuned aspects of her own. Her daughter Rhea was the Titan goddess of female fertility, motherhood, and generation, her granddaughter Demeter was the goddess of agriculture, and her great-granddaughter Persephone was the goddess of spring. She also bore the illustrious distinction of Queen of the Underworld whose lord husband was not only the god of the dead, but god of the Earth’s fertility.

Gaea allowed herself a brief distracted smirk of amusement. _That_ particular title had not come about until after he had married. What naughty things her grandson got up to with his nubile young wife.

Returning to her previous thoughts, apart from those three, there were no other nature goddesses of sufficient power worthy of wielding hers. But who should she choose?

Rhea? Her power was immense and versatile and had been in control of it for many millennia. She had seen the end of two ages and was now living a quiet life in the third, watching over her grown children from afar. She was of a sound, mature mind and the increase in power would not go to her head. But for how long would Rhea hold on to such power? She was of the elder Titan generation and already old enough to be considered an ancient being. Rhea may not wish for such power in her older age.

Perhaps Demeter would be a better choice. She was younger than Rhea, naturally, and though her ability to affect nature seemed initially limited to agricultural growth, she had proven herself perfectly capable of using her terrible grief and anger at her daughter’s abduction to render the Earth infertile and barren of plant growth for a whole year until Persephone’s return. She had created an entirely new season in the world consisting of the absence of plant life and freezing cold weather.

Hmm… perhaps Demeter wouldn’t be a good choice after all. She too easily ruled by her emotions to be entrusted with the full power of the Earth. None of the Olympian gods had been able to stop her granddaughter back then, so what damage could she unleash in her fury if given unrestricted access to the full powers of nature? In truth, though nobody knew it, Gaea had taken measures to ameliorate the strength of Demeter’s grief on nature and now the yearly turn of the seasons was as natural to the cycle of life as breathing. The weather would not remain cold and plant life would no longer fail to thrive if Persephone decided one day to never return to her mother on the surface world. Giving Demeter back that power along with the rest didn’t seem wise. She had never truly forgiven Hades for stealing and marrying her daughter and with the full power of nature at her command, she could break the laws in place regarding the consumption of Underworld food then summon forth a never-ending winter until Persephone was forcibly returned to her side. No, Demeter was too emotionally-unbalanced to be entrusted with the original forces of nature.

What then, of Persephone? She was quite a powerful nature goddess for her youth. She was an adult, even in goddess terms, but still very young with much to learn of the world and herself. She was definitely more emotionally-stable than her mother, so she wouldn’t cause an apocalypse if she didn’t get her way, but would she even be able to handle being gifted with the full powers of nature? What if it overwhelmed her and she had a mental crisis? Her marriage to Hades had worked wonders on all aspects of her maturation, and not just the strictly physical, from an isolated maiden child of flowers to a level-headed, responsible young woman of both the dead and springtime growth itself. That change alone had been an enormous upheaval for Persephone to undergo, but-

And then Gaea had it. Change. That was the deciding factor; the candidate’s ability to accept change!

Demeter had proven herself incapable of coping with change and only unwillingly assented to it because she had no power to do otherwise.

Rhea had lived through ages of change and borne it well, but like herself, she was starting to settle out and not seek such life-altering changes if she could avoid it.

Persephone hadn’t lived through such ages as her grandmother had, but she didn’t need to. In her comparatively short life, she had undergone a complete metamorphosis and was a woman almost unrecognizable from the days of her youth. She understood the necessity, even the desirability of change. She also recognized the importance of the figurative marriage of death to life and vice versa, non-withstanding how literally it applied to her own. Death begets new life and life becomes precious when it is finite. Persephone understood this never-ending cycle of living change intimately, already being an active participant in this aspect of the world. Gaea’s decision could not have been clearer.

Her successor chosen, Gaea set about transferring her vast power to her great-granddaughter, slowly and subtly. She could not give it to Persephone all at once. It was too great and the poor girl wouldn’t be able to cope with such an overload. Her body and her mind needed time to adjust to it. Fortunately, Gaea was in no hurry.

At first, aspects of her power trickled out of her and into Persephone like a leak in a clay jar, but as Persephone’s mastery of the given power grew, so too did her possession of even more of it, and Gaea increased the flow of it into the young woman. First as multiple cracks in the jar, then a pinprick of a hole, then multiple pinpricks, and then those existing pinpricks being widened into slightly larger holes, on and on in this process to use a mortal analogy. From an immortal perspective, Gaea allowed Persephone to expand and in turn, she contracted, allowing her great-granddaughter to fully encompass every aspect of nature while she steadily faded away from knowing and awareness until she was gone, becoming fully one with the Earth.

The powers of nature, and the role of the Green Mother, had been passed on to the next generation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do realize that in the Incarnations of Immortality, Chaos is male, but in the Greek mythology, Chaos is female, so I went with that.
> 
> This was a bit tricky, mostly because Gaea, according to most of the Greek mythology (I primarily use Hesiod's Theogeny for this, as it ironically is some of the simplest and easiest to understand), was one of the original primordial gods, so I imagine she's quite prideful and wouldn't dare offer her immense power to some lowly mortals. If she was to give it to anyone, I think she would want to keep it in the family, so I decided that the creation of the Office of the Incarnation of Nature would take place in two steps. One would be just the transfer of power and the other would be the passing of the office into mortal hands.
> 
> This chapter also references the Greek myth of Hades' abduction of Persephone to the Underworld for her to be his wife. I primarily use the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as my reference for this. I do believe Hades loved Persephone and that she grew to love him in time (I doubt she loved him at first though), so my writing reflects that.


	3. Fate (Clotho)

Clotho was one of the Moirai, the youngest sister of the three Fates who controlled the destinies of mankind. Their failures and their triumphs were all wrought by their nimble fingers and they had been at this task since their youth once they were old enough to manipulate the substance of the Chaos located in the Void into thin threads and weave them together into a tapestry. That instinctive urge to begin this project had resulted in what the three of them now called the Tapestry of Life. Clotho rather suspected it would continue to exist as long as mortal man existed, and not even they, having inherited some slight prophetic ability from their Titaness mother Themis, could foresee how long that would last.

It was a daunting prospect and it always threatened to overwhelm Clotho when she considered it too deeply, so she didn’t often do so, preferring to concentrate on spinning her threads, for that was the role she played in the cosmos. She was the Spinner, creating new threads of life from the stuff of Chaos for every person born which she would then pass on to her older sisters to measure and cut and weave into the Tapestry. Clotho was, to put it simply the beginning of destiny.

Unfortunately for her, spinning the raw material of Chaos into threads was not mentally-stimulating work, especially after tens of centuries doing it every single day of her life, so her mind had a tendency to wander and the topics it wandered to were not always pleasant. There were no secrets left to her in her work. She was an impeccable master of spinning such that not even Athena – though she never said this where their father’s eldest child would hear – could compare to her skill, and not even the nature of mankind was secret to her, for she had seen it all. The general patterns were all the same, even of the specific circumstances were different from individuals.

The threads, and therefore souls, were made of chaos with each possessing an unknown, unbalanced mixture of good and evil. Only their actions and their motives made that resident good or evil known and the sum total composed a whole person and decided their fate in the Underworld after death. When Hades and Persephone judged souls, they were looking directly at the composite good and evil they carried. It was a natural power they both possessed as the King and Queen of the Underworld. Their three judges, only being souls themselves, could not use this same power, but had to rely on magic tools to read the evil and good for them. Perhaps this method was not as efficient as reading the soul’s balance directly, but the system worked well enough and also freed the rulers to pursue other tasks that needed to be carried out in their kingdom.

With a thread already being spun between her fingers, Clotho glanced over at a roster with names and markers. It was a copy of the death roster Persephone had once given her a long time ago that automatically updated every time the queen updated hers. It was a comprehensive chart detailing all the souls present in the Underworld, where they had been assigned, what iteration of their lives they were on, what their previous judgements had been, and if their reincarnation cycle was complete. Clotho had no idea how she and her sisters had managed without it, but it was a most useful tool. Persephone’s meticulous record-keeping had been most helpful in making sure they used chaos stuff to extend already-existing cut threads on the Tapestry to new points in time, thus representing the reincarnation of souls from the Underworld into their new lives. Reincarnating souls had the double advantage of constantly increasing the quality of souls found in Hades over time and preventing the population of the dead from becoming too vast for the Underworld to manage properly.

Or at least, that last point was supposed to be true, but Clotho found the reality of it to be lacking in this respect.

Despite her best efforts and her close attention to the death roster, Clotho had found the demand for new threads in the Tapestry was greater than the freedom of souls available for reincarnation. She couldn’t get souls back out of the Underworld to reincarnate fast enough before their absence was replaced by yet more souls. The Underworld was surely becoming overcrowded and she was doing her best to help with the population management, but there was only so much she could do. The Moirai were committed to the Tapestry of Life first and foremost.

That thought didn’t make her feel any better than the Underworld’s overpopulation. She had begun the project with her sisters when she was just a child and they had been doing this non-stop ever since, and she doubted it would ever end. She had created thousands, maybe _millions_ of beginnings; was it her _fate_ (ironic pun intended) to never see the _end_ of anything?

Clotho abruptly set down her spinning with a huff and turned to her older sisters. Their features were the exact same as hers if she first aged twenty, then another twenty years. If they weren’t goddesses, it would be odd that there was such a massive discrepancy in the appearance of their physical ages, considering that all three of them had been born together within the same half-hour. Lachesis and Atropos stopped their work for a moment and stared at her, perplexed.

“I’m going out for a bit for some fresh air and to stretch my legs,” she said by way of an explanation, and only realized afterward how lame it sounded. Goddesses didn’t need to do such things, and indeed, their perplexity now shifted to bafflement. They looked at each other briefly before turning back to her.

“Do you want one of us to accompany you?” elderly-looking Atropos asked gently.

Clotho got along with both her sisters, but she didn’t respect Lachesis quite the same way she did Atropos. In her field of expertise, Clotho readily acknowledged that Lachesis was unmatched, but Atropos was the oldest of them, and so she had the supreme authority when tough decisions needed to be made. By contrast, she saw Lachesis as someone who got to be in charge at the last resort, so Clotho had less of an issue needling the middle Fate in the way that youngest siblings of three often do.

“No, that’s alright,” Clotho demurred. “Don’t mind me, I won’t be gone long.”

And with that, she transformed into a spider and threw out a traveling thread that carried her along out of their web-like abode in the Underworld and onto the surface world, plopping down on one of the dewy-morning webs of Arachne’s eight-legged children. It was rare for two adult spiders to share a web like this, but all spiders of the world subconsciously recognized the Master Weavers and allowed each of the three Fates to encroach on their hunting territories whenever they appeared. It certainly made for convenient, inconspicuous travel.

After greeting her temporary hostess with a friendly click of her mandibles, Clotho descended down another line to the ground and transformed back into a woman. She could see the trailing end of Eos’s dawn in the west and Helios’s first early morning rays were just starting to touch the land in this region, but already, she could see there were mortal humans out in the fields tending the growing crops. It must be summer. Clotho had known it wasn’t winter because the Underworld was significantly drearier to match Hades’ emotional state when his wife was away.

She watched the farmers as they worked, content to observe them from a distance, but making sure to mask her divine aura. There were both men and women in the fields of all ages, from children to older middle age. But those that were too elderly to assist with the physical labor were still helping by sorting seeds, watching the babes too young to work, or inspecting the plants for pest bugs or diseases. Some people were assisting in this latter task. Others were weeding the crops while others threw down compost for fertilizer and others still were watering the soil that had gone dry. There was something for everyone to do, and they would do this many times this season for many years in the future. Clotho didn’t have to look at their threads to know this.

Their work was repetitive, but necessary for these crops were the farmers’ livelihoods, both to provide nourishment for their own families and to sell or barter for other necessary goods they could not readily obtain otherwise. Still, she felt a touch of envy stirring in her breast. At least they were able to see to the completion of their tasks. The crops would be watered many more times throughout the summer, but those assigned to that task _today_ would finish it _today_. The cycle of tilling the soil, sowing the seeds, growing the crops, and harvesting them would be carried out for many years after this one, but when harvest time came, the farmers would have seen that crop year to its completion.

Not like her work which she never got to finish.

One of the men closest to her that had been bent over weeding stood up to stretch his back and in doing so, he glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye and paused, turning to face her properly. She couldn’t make out his features properly because of the distance, but he looked like a young man, or at least he didn’t have a beard to suggest an older age. He waved at her.

“Hey, Miss, are ya tryin’ to find town? Ya look lost!” he hollered. His voice was deep, not quite a bass, and it carried well even though his speech was rough.

Too late, Clotho realized how odd it would be for a normal, mortal young woman to be just standing in the middle of a road without company or provisions watching farmers work ‘just because’, but she wasn’t keen to depart back to the Underworld just yet. She had only just arrived.

She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted back, “Yes, I am lost, and I’ve run out of provisions too! Can you help me?”

“Sure thing, Miss! I’ll be righ’ over!” he answered.

The young man walked to the end of the row he was working in before jogging down the lines of rows to the road where she stood. Clotho rather suspected he would have just jumped over each of the rows if the crops hadn’t been so tall. She meandered over to the end of the rows where she would meet him and watched the young man approach. The sun was not even at its highest point yet, but he was already tunic-less which left Clotho free to admire his physique. And admire she did! She was one of the Moirai and a goddess, but that did not make her immune to the beauty of men, mortal or otherwise.

He was broad in the shoulders with a deep-barreled chest like that of a prized racehorse, had prominent, well-defined abdominal muscles, and possessed large arms rippling with thick cords of pure muscle from tilling the frost-hardened fields every spring. He was only jogging, but he didn’t seem short of breath and wasn’t sweating at all. As he drew closer, she noticed that he was not only broad, but tall like a miniature giant, and Clotho found it apt to compare his form and figure to that of a draft horse: powerful and beautifully-proportioned on a grand scale. He slowed to a halt in front of her and when he smiled, a full, wide-lipped, toothy grin that spoke more accurately of his youth than any other aspect of him. She’d thought he was in his early twenties, but now she figured he was probably closer to his late teens. His skin was browned from working in the sun and his hair, straight and trimmed short, was light brown, though she could see it was darker at the roots, and not just from the slight perspiration she noticed on his forehead and neck. He was, quite frankly, adorable, and she found herself unexpectedly abashed at his boyish manner.

“Mornin’, Miss. I’m Gaimantes; where are ya headin’ off to?” he asked, his rural country accent and moderately informal speech giving away his lack of education, but was not unpleasant to listen to.

“A good morning to you too, Gaimantes. I’m Clo-Chloe,” Clotho said, making up a name for herself mid-word on the spot. She was just here on the surface for a break, not to terrify mortals with the sudden realization that they were talking to one of the Aspects of Fate. “I’m actually headed off to…” Here she paused, not at all sure where in Hellas her travel thread had taken her or what was close by. She knew lives, not geography, and her mind frantically cast around for a suitable answer. “… Athens,” she said tentatively.

Gaimantes’ eyes widened. “Athens? That’s a mighty long way from here, ‘specially for a pretty young mai’en like you travelin’ by yerself. But that’s alrigh’, we got a map back at the house that ya can take a look at, so I can show ya the way there. If ya don’t min’ my askin’, why d’ya have to go to Athens?” he asked as he beckoned her to follow him.

“Be~cause Athena is the city’s patron goddess and I am the best weaver in my home village, but I know my own skills pale in comparison to the goddess. I wish to improve myself such that my meager works would be a credit to Athena rather than a disappointment,” Clotho invented quickly.

It was an unexpectedly believable lie, but it galled her to deprecate her own skills while praising Athena’s. However, she was pretending to be a mortal right now and to do otherwise would make Gaimantes think she was just an arrogant woman who, like Arachne, thought herself greater than the gods, and she did not want to lose his good opinion of her. Why she was so keen to keep his favor, she didn’t know.

“Oh!” Gaimantes exclaimed, looking surprised. “I guess that makes sense. I’d ‘av thought a lady like you would be goin’ to Athens to find yerself a nice, educated husband.”

Clotho laughed somewhat derisively, “Oh, I’m afraid there’s no husband for me anywhere.”

“Ya took the vow o’chastity?”

“What? No!” she squeaked, feeling her face flush with embarrassment.

“Then why d’ya say there’s no husband anywhere for ya?” he asked.

Clotho felt her flush die down as she stared up at him in bemusement. She was a complete stranger to her, so why was he so insistent on this topic? It struck her then that, at her physical age, most girls were either already married or in the process of being married off to someone, and Gaimantes was of an age to be looking for a wife. He was interested in her, and Clotho felt the blush creeping back into her cheeks again.

“My family allows me complete freedom of choice in my marriage prospects, and I confess to be a very picky woman,” she said evasively. It was half-true at any rate. She _did_ have complete freedom of choice as a goddess daughter of Themis and Zeus, but she’d never had any marriage prospects to be picky about.

“Well, maybe yer fated to meet him when ya least expect it,” he suggested with a smile and a hopeful glint in his round, honey-colored eyes.

“Why, Gaimantes, are you trying to hint that you’re interested in me?” Clotho teased, but was secretly pleased with his allusion to her work.

Now Gaimantes blushed and looked away, abashed. “Well, I’d be lyin’ if I said I _wasn’t_ interested and didn’t find ya to be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“Oh…!” she breathed, feeling her heart beat faster and her blush refused to fade. Nobody had ever called her beautiful before and she didn’t know how to react to the compliment. “Even more beautiful than Aphrodite?” Mortals were prone to fits of exaggeration, she well knew. If he answered poorly…

“I’ve never met Aphrodite, Chloe, so I can’t honestly make that comparison, but even if I had, I wouldn’t dare. It only causes mischief for us mortals if we think ourselves better than or equal to the gods,” he said seriously without pause.

Clotho half-smiled at him. “Good answer, Gaimantes.”

He glanced at her as though she’d said something strange, but he didn’t say anything about it and led her into the large house. Two women were inside already baking and Gaimantes introduced them as his mother and older sister. Gaimantes explained her situation and they greeted her warmly while he left her in their care to retrieve the map he’d told her about. The two women, the mother was Sylvia and her daughter, who was also her eldest child, was Coriander and they were generous in their offerings, despite Clotho’s protests. They incorrectly assumed she was only being humble, but to prove otherwise would be to reveal she was a goddess. Again, she wasn’t keen to have them learn the truth, and _again,_ she couldn’t figure out why.

Gaimantes returned with a rolled-up scroll in his hands and a laugh in his throat when he saw her being weighed down with a heavy bag full of food, and he teasingly suggested to his sister that she had confused Chloe for either a pack mule or an altar. That caused Coriander to throw a wet towel at him in mock outrage and it slapped him in the face with a splat. Grinning with boyish mischief, he began to use it to mop up his sweaty face and Coriander exclaimed in disgust, stalking over to wrestle the rag away from her younger brother. He put up a token struggle then laughingly surrendered it to her while she turned away with an exaggerated huff. Clotho hadn’t realized she was smiling gleefully at the playful sibling interaction until Gaimantes turned back to her and his smile brightened another notch, making her feel self-conscious.

With an extra spring in his step, he set the scroll on the rough wooden table and unrolled it, using paper weights to hold the two edges down while they looked at the map. He explained that he may not have had much of an education, but he could read a map at least, and he pointed out where his village was located then where Athens was located. He told her how much longer it would take if her travels were smooth, but that it could easily take longer if she ran into trouble.

Clotho had no genuine interest in the supposed troubles of her fake journey, but didn’t want to leave Gaimantes presence just yet, so she asked him about those. And when he had finished expounding upon those horrors, both the mundane and the supernatural, she thought of another question, then another, and another, and he answered all of them. She never wanted to hear him stop talking. Indeed, she was so absorbed in him that it was some time later before she realized Gaimantes’ mother and sister were nowhere in sight. They had been left completely alone and unsupervised.

Her first reaction was to be embarrassed, but it faded as the shock wore off and she became grateful for their quiet departure. She decided not to point this out to Gaimantes, just in case he hadn’t yet noticed. Eventually, Clotho ran out of questions to ask him and couldn’t think of any more excuses to continue remaining in his presence, so she took up her new bag of provisions (only a quarter of what Sylvia and Coriander were trying to foist on her) and set out on her ‘journey’.

“Thank you for your kindness and hospitality, Gaimantes. I shall treasure it always,” Clotho said graciously.

“It’s my pleasure, Chloe. I hope ya have a safe journey, and…” he smiled bashfully down at her, rubbing the back of his neck uncertainly. “if ya ever find yer way back in this here part o’the country, Fates be willing, I-”

Clotho reached up and planted a soft kiss on his cheek, effectively interrupting his nervous babbling. “She may be…” she whispered with a mysterious smile.

And on that enigmatic note, she turned away from him and walked away from his family’s farm, but not without sneaking a backward glance over her shoulder and a small wave. Once she was out of sight of the farm, Clotho did not return to the Abode immediately, but traveled to the next village over, still masking her divinity. There, she gifted her food to a humble, hungry family who had greater need of it than she, and when they tried to refuse, she revealed her divine aura which simultaneously revealed her identity, and they promptly prostrated themselves before her, praising her for her mercy.

Very few mortals met the gods in-person, their most-common connection to them being through prayers, sacrifices, and temple guardians. When they _did_ meet a god with their divinity unmasked though, the distinct nature of each god’s aura meant that mortals instinctively recognized them and knew their identity. Mortals’ artistic renditions of the gods were not always accurate and some gods had very little such art if they were minor or unpopular.

Clotho left the mortal family with the food she did not need and cast a travel thread back home without transforming back into her spider form first. She traveled along its length and landed neatly back in the quiet spider-web Abode that she shared with her sisters. Lachesis was still weaving more threads into the Tapestry and Atropos was still cutting threads. Now that she was back, it was as if nothing _had_ changed. But nothing had changed. She was still Clotho, one of the three Fates, the Spinner of the threads of life and the beginning of human destiny. That had not suddenly ended when she took her several-hours-long break to interact with mortals and enjoy the company of a human man.

On the other hand, one could argue that something _had,_ in fact, changed. She had interacted with mortals purely for the fun of it rather than as a part of a job and she had been treated like a normal young woman for the first time in her immortal existence. A young woman who had caught the eye of a handsome young man who she had found just as attractive as he found her and whose presence she had enjoyed immensely. He was lively and fun and refreshing in a way that made her giddy with excitement. It was a feeling she’d never experienced before and thinking about him made her want to sigh with longing.

“Oh, Clotho, you’re finally back. Is everything okay?” Lachesis asked, being the first to notice her return.

Atropos looked up from her cutting to hear her answer. Clotho didn’t speak immediately, but looked first at her basket full of chaotic soul stuff and her spindle, then her elder sisters’ concerned faces. “Yes, everything is fine. I feel much better for the reprieve, but I have to get back to work now.”

She was not fine and they didn’t believe her. Their expressions never changed as they watched her return to her place on Lachesis’s left and begin spinning the soul stuff on the distaff into thin life threads. Clotho was determinedly not looking at them. She could lie to mortals with ease, but her sisters knew her better and she’d never been able to lie good enough to fool them.

“You… seemed to enjoy yourself while you were on your break. Do you want to talk about it?” Lachesis offered tentatively.

Clotho could have smacked herself. Stupid, stupid! Lachesis was the Weaver and even the gods had life threads! Of course she would have examined her thread out of worry and would have seen what course it took! The Fates’ greatest-kept secret was that even though Lachesis was the Weaver of threads into the Tapestry of Life, the threads did possess a modicum of self-direction. In fact, this little secret meant that Lachesis very rarely played a direct role in shaping a person’s destiny, and this applied to both gods and mortals. Lachesis hadn’t directed her interaction with Gaimantes, but she had definitely observed it.

“No,” Clotho said shortly and focused exclusively on her spinning.

Lachesis and Atropos both gave up on trying to get her to open up about her adventure and resumed their own work. Meanwhile, Clotho found herself grateful for being such an expert spinner, because she couldn’t stop thinking of Gaimantes’ playful smile.

()()()()()

Two years had passed since Clotho had first seen Gaimantes and though she had not visited him again, she never stopped thinking of him. She doubted he would remember some stray traveling girl he had briefly shared a few morning hours talking with, but she kept an eye on his and his immediately family’s threads every so often out of fondness for the memories she had. Gaimantes had a couple flings over the past two years, but she was privately pleased that none of them had been serious, despite how ridiculous it was for her to care. And his older sister, Coriander, had married shortly after she’d left and Clotho was thrilled to discover that one of the threads she had spun was for a baby between her and her new husband. She checked on their small section of the Tapestry more frequently as the impending due date for the baby’s arrival approached, and it was because of that attenuation that she one day noticed Atropos hovering in that area with her scissors poised to cut and her expression grim.

“Atropos, what are you doing?!” Clotho asked in sudden fear, dropping her threads and moving to her eldest sister’s side.

“Clotho? I’m just cutting some threads. They’re starting to clump too close together in this section of the Tapestry and if I don’t trim it now, we’re going to end up with a big tangle a few years down the line, and it will throw off the pattern,” Atropos explained.

Clotho bit her lip and her eyes darted frantically to each of the nearby threads. Every single one of them was kin to Gaimantes in some form or another by blood and by marriage, though some were more distantly related than others. Perhaps it was one of them that Atropos was after? Clotho relaxed her focus on the details and expanded her awareness to view the larger pattern, which encompassed the past, the present, and a relatively short (to immortals) time period into the future. She rarely used this power compared to Lachesis and Atropos, but it was one of her gifts as an Aspect of Fate. Nevertheless, she could see the tangles that Atropos had foreseen and she zeroed in on that clump… and the key threads…

Her eyes shot open in sudden horror. No, it couldn’t be! And then she saw Atropos’s scissors approaching those threads. “Atropos, you can’t!” Clotho cried, grabbing Atropos’s arm and hauling it back with all her might.

“Clotho, I have to!” Atropos exclaimed, bewildered. “You _saw_ the tangle, same as I did! Cutting these two threads now will minimize the extent of future mortal suffering. We’ve been doing this for centuries; you _know_ this!”

Clotho shut her eyes and shook her head. She knew Atropos was right, but she didn’t want to hear it. “I don’t care! You can still cut threads! Any other threads, just not those two!” she shrieked, tears starting to spill from her eyes.

“Heavens above, get a grip on yourself, Clotho!” Lachesis shouted and Clotho suddenly found herself wrenched away from Atropos.

Lachesis had her arms wrapped tightly around her waist and she had managed to weave a quick net of threads to pin her arms to her sides and prevent her from fighting back. Now unhindered, Atropos’s scissors approached the fated threads once more. Desperation filled Clotho and she struggled valiantly against her bonds. Even with the threads holding her in place, Lachesis couldn’t let go of her for even an instant.

“What’s the matter with you?!” Lachesis exclaimed in frustration. “You’ve been mooning over that mortal man ever since you happened to run into him on your spur-of-the-moment break two years ago, and you haven’t been the same since! Mortals have to be born and mortals have to die; that’s the way the world works and we are too powerful entities to put our own selfish desires ahead of the greater needs of the world, so sit still and let Atropos do her job!”

Clotho’s fury peaked, but just when she opened her mouth to give Lachesis a piece of her mind, two snips broke through the suddenly-quiet din. She fell silent, numb with horror as she watched the tail ends of two life threads fall slowly to the ground… the remaining potential lives of Coriander and her baby… Clotho didn’t feel Lachesis release her nor the comforting hand on her shoulder or the steady flow of tears streaming down her face.

Coriander… Gaimantes’ older sister, the woman who’d welcomed her with kindness and offerings of food for a traveling stranger without hesitation… who’d playfully thrown a towel at her little brother and wrestled it back from him… who’d been recently married and probably been filled with so much hope for her family’s future… who was now dead from childbirth, along with her unborn baby.

Distantly, she felt Atropos’s arms come around her and embrace her, as if it were happening to someone else. “I’m sorry, Clotho,” she murmured sadly. “I know you’re fond of that family, but everyone has a time to live and a time to die. I don’t _like_ causing unnecessary pain to mortals; you know that, honey. We’re Underworld goddesses, not Olympian.”

It was an inside joke in Hades that the Underworld deities were more feared among mortals, but the Olympians were more temperamental and more dangerous to them. In any other situation, it probably would have gotten a chuckle or at least a smirk out of her.

Atropos continued, “I’m just doing my job trying to make sure the entire future of humanity does not unravel. I have to make decisions based on the greatest good for the Tapestry as a whole. We’re too powerful to have favorites.”

Clotho frowned. The Tapestry, the Tapestry, it all came back to that _stupid_ Tapestry! She pushed out of Atropos’s arms, staring blankly down at her knees. “You don’t get it,” she said without feeling. “They’re not just _threads_ you’re cutting, they’re _lives_ you’re ending.”

“Clotho…” Lachesis sighed with suppressed frustration, but Clotho didn’t want to hear it.

“I’m going out,” she said as she stood up and walked away from them.

She didn’t tell them where she was going, but it wasn’t exactly a mystery. Neither of them tried to stop her and for that, she was grateful. Clotho transformed into a spider, masked her divine aura, and cast her thread out to Gaimantes’ family farm all in a second. A quick glance around with her eight eyes showed nobody was around and she transformed back to her normal form. It was the middle of the day, but there was no one out tending the fields today. She swallowed heavily and approached the homestead. It hardly differed from her memory of the place when she was last here a mere two years ago.

She reached the front door and knocked on the wood, idly wondering what she would say to explain her presence. Coriander had not been dead an hour yet and she was a mere stranger to this family. By rights, they had no reason to allow her to share in their private grief.

The door opened and with a start, she realized it was Gaimantes, two years older still large and beautiful, but with the beginnings of a short beard and his features fresh with numb grief. He was still in shock, not having fully-processed his sister’s death yet.

He stared at her in confusion for a moment, and then his eyes widened with remembrance. “Chloe!” he said hoarsely. “But how… why are ya here?”

Struck with inspiration, she knew what to say. “A fortnight ago, I had a premonition that something bad would happen to a person I cherished, and that this was the place I needed to be,” she explained.

Gaimantes’ expression crumpled and without warning, he flung himself upon her much-smaller frame. His arms wrapped all the way around her and his chest heaved with terrible, ugly sobs as the enormity of his grief was unleashed. It was pure agony and his pain freed hers from beneath her controlled façade. Clotho clung to him just as tightly and cried loudly into his shoulder. For the first time in her immortal life, she truly understood the pain of losing a loved one. Even knowing the kindness and fairness of the rulers awaiting the souls in the Underworld did nothing to ease her grief for the loss of life.

Clotho eventually managed to lead Gaimantes back into the house with the rest of the family. Everyone stared at her in confusion except Sylvia her clapped her hands to her mouth and then moved forward to embrace her, whispering a heartfelt ‘thank you’ into her ear. With the matriarch’s acceptance of her, so too did everyone else, sharing their grief and starting to make preparations for Coriander’s and the baby’s burial with the proper funeral rites so that their souls would have no trouble reaching the Underworld and being taken by Charon from across the Styx beyond the black gates to Hades proper where their souls would be judged. Clotho did not dare leave the family in mourning, and would not have unless they asked her, even when she ended up staying a day, then several days, then a week. She knew her work as the Spinner of Threads was falling behind, but she didn’t care. If things were truly desperate, her sisters would have fetched her posthaste. Besides, there were plenty of spare threads for Lachesis to use and Gaimantes’ family’s needs were greater at the moment. 

Gaimantes himself seemed to cling to her like a lifeline, hardly letting her go or out of his sight, but Clotho found she didn’t mind. Even if he was only keeping close to her for comfort, she found she liked the attention and affection he bestowed upon her, however little it was. However, it was one of the mornings that she had woken early to help Sylvia with starting the baking for the day that she found herself having a conversation she did not expect.

“Gaimantes loves you, you know,” Sylvia said solemnly. “You may have only been a traveler passing through for a few hours, and that’s hardly any time to build a proper relationship, but he’s been head-over-heels in love with you ever since. Logically, he knew he would never see you again, and why would he? You were just a girl who stopped by on your way to Athens to master her craft. What future could he ever offer you that wouldn’t be ten times better in Athens was what he thought, and he tried to forget you. He tried beginning relationships with other local girls, but his heart was never fully in it, for they were never you. Even I thought his love for you was a lost cause. That it was doomed to torment him for the rest of his mortal life… until last week when you appeared in the doorway supporting my son with tears in your eyes as if you already knew what had happened and known all along that you were needed here. For what it’s worth, I thank the Fates for your miraculous arrival.”

A lump had stuck in her throat and it was making it difficult to swallow. Clotho felt like she might cry anew. Syliva, wonderful loving Sylvia had no idea how literally-spoken her praise was.

“I love him,” she choked, realizing for the first time that it was true. “Oh, I love him and I want to stay with him always, but I can’t. I just can’t!” she sobbed louder with her hands covering her mouth and her tears falling again. “I… I have a job, a _role_ in our family that only I can do along with my sisters. I want to live with Gaimantes and be a part of this family, but I can’t forsake my work or the family I’d be leaving behind!” She buried her face in her hands and collapsed to her knees, the full weight of the conflict between her desires and her duty leaving her powerless.

She felt two gentle hands on her shoulders and was brought into the older woman’s embrace, one hand stroking through her hair in a soothing motion. “Duty to family is an important and admirable thing, but if I were to offer you any advice, dear, as an older woman to a young one, don’t let time pass you by, because life’s too short to waste where you’re happy. Take advantage of what life has to offer you when you can, because otherwise it might be too late. You’re a good girl, Chloe, and I’m sure your family will support you fully, no matter which path you choose,” Sylvia said kindly.

Clotho had no answer for that and only managed to cling to Sylvia until her tears eventually subsided. She knew what she wanted and her sisters _would_ probably (hopefully) support her choice. She just didn’t know if what she wanted was even _possible_.

After Coriander and her baby’s bodies had been buried and a socially-proper mourning period had been observed, Clotho knew she had to return back to the Abode to her sisters. She kissed Gaimantes farewell, not knowing when she would see him again, but promising her love all the same. He confessed that he had fully expected to live the rest of his life without ever seeing her again. That he had and she loved him too was an incredible gift, and he dared not ask for more. She kissed him once more and left before his sweet words weakened her will such that she failed to return home.

Just as before, she walked out of sight of the farmstead before traveling directly to the Abode. Her older sisters noticed her arrival immediately. They put down their tools and ran forward to embrace her, not a single angry or scolding word passing from their lips. They knew, and Clotho discovered that her tears had not dried up just yet.

“I love Gaimantes, but I love you too. I can’t leave you two alone to do your own work _and_ mine! If I could only _give_ my power to another, then I wouldn’t feel so guilty about wanting to leave you,” Clotho howled in anguish into Atropos’s soft shoulder.

“There may be a way, Clotho…” Lachesis said slowly and Clotho looked at her in bewilderment.

Lachesis’s expression was ponderous and she beckoned her and Atropos to follow her to the Tapestry. They did so and Lachesis touched their shoulders. Suddenly, her selective view of the Tapestry was theirs and they could see what she saw. Far into the past and as far into the future as they could look, Clotho saw a single unbroken, white line. It had a faint glow about it, similar to that identifying gods’ threads, but not as bright, and the pattern of the thread looked odd. Several times along the line, it would suddenly twist and veer off to some other location in the Tapestry. The amount of distance between these veer-offs was not consistent in the least and there seemed to be no order to it. Clotho found herself staring at this strange, seemingly single immortal, but non-godly line in awe. They would have noticed long before now if it had interfered with the pattern of the Tapestry. Indeed, its precarious placements seemed to actually facilitate the pattern once she expanded her awareness to the whole Tapestry with a focus on that one thread’s location. But how had such a thread escaped their notice? Or maybe it hadn’t; Lachesis seemed to know of it.

“What is this?” Clotho asked.

“I think you’ve actually helped me figure out the answer to that very question, Clotho,” Lachesis answered. “You remember fifty years ago when Gaea… faded away, but transferred the power of nature to Persephone?”

Clotho swallowed and nodded. They had only known of Gaea’s passing because of the threads. Because the power had not vanished, nobody else was aware of her death, not even her Titaness children who still roamed the Earth that was her body.

“Before she died, Gaea’s life thread joined with Persephone’s for a good long time and the bright green hue of divine aura that suffused her thread slowly transferred over from her to Persephone until it was completely gone from her own. Only then did her thread separate from Persephone and end shortly after. You can’t easily see Gaea’s divine aura because Persephone’s own is a swirling mixture of green and black, but it’s still there and it’s different, not as strong as when it was a part of Gaea. And a close look at Gaea’s own thread reveals that it’s still her color green, but it doesn’t have the luster of divinity. She… died or faded away fully mortal,” Lachesis said, somewhat haltingly.

She was aware of this much. Gaea’s actions had been confusing and her death alarming. They had spent much time trying to understand what she’d done and how. They were never able to figure out why. Clotho had thought there had been no more mysteries in the Tapestry after that, but she must have been mistaken.

Lachesis continued. “Not long after, I discovered this strange white thread that glowed with a divine aura similar to Gaea’s after she transferred her power to Persephone, but it doesn’t follow the same pattern. For one, the intensity of the luster is fully divine until a little over a thousand years ago when it makes the first sharp twist and obtains this dimmer shine for as far as we can see.”

“If it was fully divine over a thousand years ago, that means they were a full god, right? Whose thread is this?” Clotho asked, mostly to herself as she peered at the thread in question.

She had the answer and uttered it at the same time as Lachesis and Atropos, “Chronos.”

The original, primordial god of time who was forever hovering just on the precipice of reality and awareness, distant and omnipresent.

“And if you both look closely at each of those sharp turns, you’ll notice something else interesting,” Lachesis said vaguely.

Clotho focused her attention on one of the more recent turns. The juncture seemed unusually thick and it was difficult to figure out why. She squinted her eyes, trying to trace the threads. She tried following it from left to right from the past towards the future the way all other life threads were read, but she kept losing track of it somehow. In frustration, she tried reading the line from the other direction from the future towards the past, and surprisingly found it worked. It made no sense, but she didn’t question it and followed the line in that direction until she finally came upon the juncture where the line would soon veer off in a completely different direction.

Following it this closely though, Clotho noticed that the end of the right thread she had been following had a small knot, just barely noticeable, right at the beginning of the next glowing thread with none left over. It wasn’t one thread, but two! Every single unexpected switch in direction was the start of a new thread! And that wasn’t all she discovered; the glimmer of immortality shone on the left thread after (if one was reading right to left) the knot, but _before_ the knot, she spied, still attached, but hidden by its mundanity, a mortal thread that wanted to be read in the correct direction from left to right. On the brink of understanding, she found that mortal thread’s beginning and traced its life from birth all the way until it reached that juncture where it met the two semi-immortal threads. Clotho zoomed in on that point until the threads were as large as sea ship ropes and she gaped in wide-eyed amazement.

The mortal life thread met the white-glowing life thread of the future which tied itself in a knot around the mortal one, but then that mortal life thread immediately curled away from the future, traveling forward, but into the past with that same white shimmer as the other thread. Hardly daring to believe what she was seeing, she took a quick glance at the first juncture and saw the same thing happen there. Chronos’s life thread turned backward on itself into the past once it met that future thread. It followed the same pattern as the others; the only difference was that his life thread wasn’t mortal for the first half.

“Chronos has become like Gaea,” she breathed at last. “He’s gone, but his power remains with another. But Lachesis, if I’m reading these threads right, then that means Chronos’s powers and immortality have been passed on to mortals?”

“That seems to be the case,” Lachesis said with a nod and removed her hands from their shoulders, releasing them from the focus on the glowing white thread. “Gaea passed her power on to Persephone, but now I wonder if it was only family pride that caused her to choose Persephone and not simply bestow it upon just any mortal on a whim. But this is my idea for how we can help you.”

The air around them seemed to thicken with somber tension. “How do you mean?” Clotho asked quietly.

Lachesis didn’t look at her, but continued to speak directly to the Tapestry. “Because of Chronos and Gaea, we now know the powers of the gods can be transferred to others, and can even be used successfully by mortals. The various… incarnations of Chronos don’t seem capable of living past the moment their life began, but Gaea was mortal and living after she transferred her power, brief as it was. If we… find a young mortal woman who would be willing to take over your role… and become you in spirit, if not in body, then I would be able to switch the threads and transfer your souls between bodies, her mortal one becoming yours and your immortal one becoming hers…”

Lachesis’s voice was now shaky and Clotho saw she was crying. “If we can find someone… You would age… grow old… and eventually die, but… you would… be able to spend the rest of your life with the man you love.”

Clotho stared at her and then looked over at Atropos. Silent tears were streaming down her face and Clotho felt her own stinging with emotion. Doing this would mean her death sooner rather than later, but they loved her and were willing to let her go if this was what made her happy. She spread her arms wide and wrapped one each around their shoulders, bringing them close and pressing her forehead to theirs.

“Thank you!” she gasped. There was, of course, no need for her to explain, and the three Moirai sisters sat together in their tight circle, leaving mankind’s destiny on pause for a bit as they shared mixed joy and sadness.

Finding a mortal woman within the correct age range who had good potential to be the replacement Spinner for the Threads of Life _and_ was willing to make the switch was a special challenge in and of itself, but they eventually found a young woman named Rhodeia. She was the eldest child with five younger brothers in a family that had fallen on hard times. She was of marriageable age and her features were fair, but she was too poor to be married off to a decent husband and her father would not allow her to marry scum, and in the meantime, she was just another mouth to feed.

Rhodeia was sitting with her family when the Moirai arrived and approached her with the offer. Her pale blue eyes shone with the desire to accept the proposal, but she wordlessly glanced to her father first as if asking his permission to go.

Her father shook his head and spoke, “If Fate bids you to go and this is what you desire, my daughter, then you must go. You shan’t look to me for guidance any longer, my sweet-tempered Rhodeia, for you are Fate now. It is up to you to begin your new life and chart the beginning of human destiny.”

With those parting words of encouragement, the father embraced his tall daughter and embraced the rest of her family in turn before approaching the three waiting Fates. Clotho offered her hand and Rhodeia took it. Magic infused the two women and Clotho felt the curious sensation of drifting forward without moving, akin to the way she traveled with her threads. When the sensation had faded, Clotho found herself still holding Rhodeia’s hand and Rhodeia standing before her, but now Rhodeia was standing next to Lachesis and Atropos and there was a faint, godly yellow aura that seemed to infuse every aspect of her being. Clotho knew she was a mortal and her real name was Rhodeia, but the aura seemed to say that her name was Clotho, the Spinner of the Threads, sister to the Moirai, and the youngest aspect of Fate. The transfer had been successful. Rhodeia was now the new Clotho.

Overwhelmed with emotion, Clotho flung her arms around Rhodeia and spouted off a confusing gibberish of ‘thank yous’, ‘I’m so gratefuls’, and ‘you have no idea how much this means to mes’. The words were a mess, but Rhodeia understood the meaning and hugged her back in gratitude. Once she released the young woman, she turned to face her older sisters. Their divine auras had a much stronger luminescence than Rhodeia’s and she supposed it was because they were born goddesses while Rhodeia was a mortal who had inherited the power. Both Atropos and Lachesis were trying to smile for her, but the sadness lurked in their eyes and Clotho found her own grief surging forward. From the moment of her birth, they had always been with her and she had spent her entire life with them. She did not regret her decision to become mortal, but she would miss her sisters terribly. The three of them came together for one last embrace with tears in their eyes and pain in their hearts.

“I’ll miss you both,” Clotho sniffled.

“So will we,” Lachesis said with a choked sob. “Even…” she sniffed heavily. “Even when you’re being a pest, we still love you.”

“Love and be happy and enjoy your new life, Clotho,” Atropos whispered, still trying to be strong and supportive even when she was this close to breaking. “But don’t ever forget us or where you came from, little one.”

At last, Clotho smiled slightly and nuzzled her sisters’ cheeks with her own. “How could I ever?” she asked rhetorically.

Their three-way hug eventually ended, their parting words spoken, and now it was time to part ways for good. Clotho grabbed both Rhodeia’s hand and Atropos’s, and Atropos held one of Lachesis’s. With her free hand, Lachesis cast her travel thread to Gaimantes’ homestead, carrying the other three along through their attached hands. When they landed on the dirt path, they released hands. Rhodeia looked around in bewilderment at her surroundings, marveling at the almost instantaneous teleportation, but Clotho only had eyes for the soul-deep gray ones of her sisters that were exactly like her own.

They nodded encouragingly and Clotho moved forward towards the homestead, looking around for Gaimantes and wondering how much time had passed since her last visit. In her search for a replacement Clotho, she hadn’t kept close track of mortal time.

“Chloe!” a familiar shout reached her. She whirled around to find the source and saw Gaimantes running towards her flat-out through the fields.

A wide smile split her face and she ran to meet him. She made no move to slow down as he came closer, but he caught her up in his arms before they crashed and he kissed her passionately. She responded with enthusiasm to his welcome until at last he set her back down on the ground.

“Chloe, yer back, or am I only dreamin’?” he asked with a breathless sigh.

Clotho, now Chloe, giggled and wrapped her arms lovingly around his neck. “It’s no dream, Gaimantes. I’m here, and I’m here to stay for good this time.”

His honey-colored eyes widened with hope. “Ya mean…?”

“Yes, my love, for the rest of my mortal years, if you so desire me.” Then, with a knowing smirk, she said, “The Fates are willing.” And she kissed him again.

The remaining original two Moirai watched their little sister’s happy reunion with her lover from a distance with joy, but also with grief in their hearts. Satisfied that the newly-mortal Clotho would be content in her new life, they took hands with each other and Rhodeia and traveled back to the Abode on a thread. There was much to teach the newly-immortal Clotho about her new role and the workings of the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so the first of the planned mortal Incarnations is born.
> 
> This chapter ended up QUITE a bit longer than I had initially planned. Some of it was necessary to set up directly for the events of the next chapter and some of it was necessary to setup now at the first _true_ beginning of the Incarnations which would play an important role in future chapters.
> 
> However, I'd originally had no intention of going into as much detail as I did about Clotho's love interest, but when it came time to write him, I couldn't just throw him into a side paragraph and use that to make a reasonable justification for Clotho's extreme decision to leave her old life behind to join him as a mortal. So I had to give him a bit more depth. And really, I could have written more (I almost ended up doing that on a few occasions), but the focus of the chapter IS on Clotho's transferal of her power from her to a mortal woman.
> 
> Incarnations of Immortality fans who know "A Tangled Skein" very well (or just re-read the book recently) will notice that there are some slight discrepancies in how the three Moirai handle their aspects of the job and their interactions with the Tapestry (apart from the fact that there are still three separate bodies). Keep in mind that at the moment, these three Fates are the original _goddesses_ of Fate, and so their level of awareness and power is on a higher plane than even the mortals who assume their offices. There are still two more Fate chapters to be written and I'll also be using those to expand on this distinction a bit more.


	4. Good and Evil (Part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've put this chapter off for quite a while and I really liked it, so I wanted to get it out as soon as possible, but it means I haven't really had a chance to proofread it and I'm tired, so there might be things that don't make sense or are unnecessarily repetitive. I'll try and fix it later.

Hades, the God of the Underworld and Lord of the Dead, had a problem. A big problem. One that he’d never thought would _be_ a problem. The Underworld was beyond capacity. There were too many dead souls and not enough space to put them. It would have been easy to blame the new Clotho (and hadn’t _that_ been a shock to learn that the Clotho he’d always known had given up her power and immortality in order to marry and spend the rest of her life with a mortal man) for not removing souls from Asphodel quick enough, but that would be unfair. Clotho was doing her best, but for every soul from Asphodel that she used in the cycle of reincarnation, two more took its place. It was not her fault that there were too many people being born and dying. It had been a growing issue long before she had assumed the office. Clotho had not _caused_ the problem, only inherited it.

He was sure that the Underworld’s overpopulation was due to some powerful underlying force, but he hadn’t yet discerned the nature of it and he needed to solve the real estate problem now, before he could even begin to tackle the larger issue at hand.

“ _Hades,_ you already know what you have to do, you just don’t want to admit it,” Persephone sighed in exasperation when he confessed his thoughts on the matter to her one evening as they were getting ready for bed.

“No, I don’t,” he retorted, a slight frown creasing his brow.

Persephone gave him the _look_ through the mirror of her vanity while she was brushing her long brown hair and sighed again. “Fine, be difficult. The problem is not _space,_ it’s the _perception_ of space. You know perfectly well that the Underworld is not on the same plane of existence as the rest of the world and that all the souls who come here go through a translation process that makes them appear as whole and solid as they were in life, rather than as transparent ghosts. Naturally, this doesn’t affect immortal beings like us, but this means, my dear husband, that you have the entirety of the cosmos available to you to place souls where you wish, whether it’s underground or in the skies, and it won’t interfere with anyone else’s reality because the souls live in a separate one.”

Hades knew this was true and it was the Underworld’s best-kept secret. Mortals seeking the Underworld, such as Heracles, Orpheus, Psyche, or even that damned wife-stealer Pirithious, were automatically translated without their awareness, even when they weren’t dead. As Persephone said, the gods weren’t affected by the translation, and the only reason they were always able to find his domain without his express consent was because he ‘kept the front doors open’, so to speak. But if he ever went to war with the Olympians, they would very quickly find that there was no Underworld to be found and would be unable to invade his domicile. Only his favorite nephew of the Olympians, Hermes, had been granted permission to find and enter his realm, even if the ‘doors closed’.

Persephone set down her brush and spun around on her stool to face him, smiling lovingly at him as she stood and approached. She placed her hands lightly upon his cheeks and kissed him deeply. Hades succumbed to her will without a struggle and his hands stroked through her long, wavy brown hair, brushing it off her shoulders to caress her neck and back without hinderance. She had been a lovely little thing the day he’d stolen her from the surface world, like a fragile spring flower. Now, several centuries into their marriage, she was a stunningly beautiful woman, filled with confidence and a mature elegance that was distinctly regal. And she was his. Even with their marriage’s torrid beginning, Persephone had come to love him as much as he loved her and they had been happily married all this time.

Persephone broke apart first, slowly, and didn’t pull out of his arms. “Hades, you have to separate the realm.”

Hades scowled and averted his grayish-blue eyes from her dark green ones. “I can’t.”

He saw her roll her eyes out of the corner of his. “You _can,_ Hades.”

“No, I _can’t_ ,” he insisted.

“It’s not a question of power. You’ve been the god of the second dimension from the moment you won the rulership of the Underworld at the end of the Titanomachy. You alone have the power to remake the borders of the Underworld to also encompass the heaven and earth, thus solving the overpopulation problem,” Persephone said logically.

“I can’t _do_ that,” he said through gritted teeth, feeling his temper rise as it always did when he considered expanding the borders of the Underworld… and what that truly _meant._

“Can’t or _won’t_?” Persephone demanded coolly.

“ _Won’t_ ,” he growled, releasing his wife and stepping away, turning his back to her.

Persephone groaned. “Hades, you can _not_ hold this grudge against him forever.”

“Watch me,” he muttered mutinously.

“But he’s done nothing to you since Zeus forgave him and his brothers for their sins and released them from Tartarus,” she offered.

A mirthless bark of laughter burst forth from his lips. “ _Zeus_ forgave him! Well, then that makes everything alright then, doesn’t it?! Never mind that _Zeus_ was the only one lucky enough of the six of us to escape _his_ wrath! Never mind that he was free to grow up in a largely peaceful, if hidden existence full of light and warmth and even a slight semblance of freedom! _Never **mind** that Zeus suffered the **least** at his hands and therefore has **no** right to forgive him for **anything**!_ ” He whirled on her suddenly, his eyes flashing with anger. “Even your own _mother_ , who you _know_ how much I _love_ , has more right than _Zeus_ in this matter!”

In the early days of their relationship, Persephone would have cowered away from his emotional reaction. But she knew him now, and knew that he only reacted so violently on topics he was sensitive towards. She approached him again, completely unfazed by his temper, and laid her palms flat on his chest.

“Darling, I repeat myself: Cronus has done _nothing_ to you since he was freed from Tartarus. He has been a good king to Elysium,” she said soothingly.

Hades’ lips curled into a sneer, but it was not directed at his wife. “He’s a Titan of Time, the ravage of time, to be specific. He’s only waiting for the moment I show weakness and then he’ll strike while our guard is down. Cronus doesn’t _dare_ reveal his true colors while I’m still the undisputed King of the Underworld and can send him back to Tartarus the very _instant_ he moves to betray me. Father is quite the fan of irony, even though it was irony that his own children overthrew him just as he did to his own father.”

“And what if he’s _not_ pretending?” Persephone countered seriously. “What if he really _is_ sorry for what he did to you and your siblings? What if he really is trying to turn over a new leaf and be a good king to the blessed souls to make up for being a bad king the first time around? What if, incredible as it may seem to you, he’s trying to do the right thing and take some of the managing work off your back as a way of apologizing for how horrible a parent he was?”

The king and queen held each other’s unyielding stares until at last, Hades’ stern frown softened into a solemn smile and he brushed some of his wife’s wavy locks behind her ear. “I love you so much, Persephone. You can be as firm, intolerant, and prideful as I when the occasion calls for it, but you can also be immeasurably kind and merciful to those whose lots in life have been unfairly cruel through no fault of their own. It is one of the many qualities I admire in you, but this time, you’re wrong.”

Persephone’s brow furrowed slightly in her frustration. “You sound so incredibly self-assured of that,” she said archly.

“Cronus is a Titan. All of the older generation of Titans controlled some aspect of time and possessed some measure of prophetic ability. He will never change. He’s incapable of it.”

“The protogenoi, Titans, and gods alike are deathless, Hades, not timeless. You yourself said your father was the ravages of time. Even if it is often destruction that follows in the wake of time’s passing, it does still represent a form of change,” she reasoned.

She had him there, but Hades didn’t want to admit it. In the face of his stubborn silence, Persephone huffed and slid her palms across his chest and down his arms to his hands which she took into her own. She led him toward their bed and sat down on the edge of it. He joined her on it, sitting so close their thighs touched, and he chose to focus on their entwined fingers rather than her frustrated expression. She had by no means given up.

“You have to separate the realm, Hades,” she repeated sternly and refused to let him interrupt her as she spoke over his attempts. “You have to, but you don’t want to because then you would have to give up some of your authority over the direct management of the five areas of soul residences in the Underworld. That would mean allowing Cronus greater autonomy over Elysium, and you, my stubborn unforgiving husband, hold grudges like no other except for my mother and are afraid of what Cronus may do if you let him out of your sight and supervision.” When she finished, he glanced up at her face and she raised an eyebrow. “Am I wrong?”

On the contrary, she knew him too well. Her uncanny ability to read into his secret heart and lay bare his naked fears and feelings had taken her centuries to master, and it was one that he found as refreshing as it was torturous. Truth was absolute as was death, and he dealt directly with both in the judgment of souls. As a way of life, he preferred to deal in truth, both from his subjects and his family. However, that didn’t mean it couldn’t leave him just as shaken and vulnerable as anyone else, especially when it was his own truths presented before him that he couldn’t deny.

“Never, dear one,” he whispered in response to her question. “But can you blame me? Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Poseidon, and I… he stole our childhood and innocence away from us. We all grew up into adults _physically_ while isolated in the darkness, having only each other for company, but our minds were still as innocent as those of children. Even when Zeus freed us from Cronus’s belly, our minds were not allowed to develop properly because our freedom from Cronus was Zeus’s declaration of war against the Titans. Zeus thinks of the Titanomachy as some great war to overthrow a cruel tyrant and begin a new era of prosperity, but that’s not how the rest of us see it. For us, it was a fight for our very lives, and we _had_ to win because to do less meant death and darkness.” He gave a short, dry laugh. “Ironically, that’s _still_ what I ended up getting.”

Persephone sighed softly and one of her hands released his to cup his cheek. He leaned into the contact, reveling in her gentle warmth in his moment of vulnerability.

“I cannot properly comprehend the depth of the hurt you suffered at Cronus’s hands and I know the first and only words you exchanged with him immediately after Zeus’s ruling were… cruelly accurate,” she admitted ruefully. “but will you let that prevent you from doing what must needs be done for the good of the realm? You know the solution and have the power to implement it. It is only your lack of willingness to trust Cronus that has prevented you from acting these last few decades. Since he is the one you take issue with, perhaps it is time you try talking with him again.”

Hades’ ire surged like a rising tsunami. “I will _never_ -!”

“-Oh, stop it already! I’m not asking you to forgive him or even to trust him!” Persephone snapped, her patience with him on this matter finally at its limit. “Just _talk_ to Cronus and work out some kind of compromise, but at least give him _that_ courtesy. Zeus may not have suffered as grievously by his hands as you and he’s horrific in the way he treats women, but when it comes to the just punishments of men, he’s no fool and would not have treated Cronus any lighter than you would have simply for being your father.”

“ _Zeus_ made sure he wouldn’t have the opportunity to interact with him on a regular basis after he passed judgement,” Hades muttered darkly, but he promised he would consider it and brought his wife into his arms, silencing any further protestations with an ardent kiss.

Long after Persephone had fallen asleep, warm and cuddled against his side with one of her arms draped across his bare chest, Hades still lay wide awake, brooding angrily not primarily on Cronus this time, but on Zeus. His youngest brother had been the subject of much of his bitterness and ire in his life. There were just so many things he had hated him for.

In the beginning, it was only petty jealousy for being condemned to the social isolation and apparent dismal gloom of what he perceived as the lowliest of the three realms while Zeus took the grand, illustrious heavens to be his own domain. Time had dulled that sharp edge and he no longer resented Zeus for his supposed pleasures. Unlike Zeus, Hades had no fear of a jealous wife who would torment his lovers or demigod children because he had none. The four children he’d sired had been borne exclusively by his wife, and he’d helped her raise all six of their claimed children: the Furies, Adonis, Melinoe, and Macaria, though one of them was only of his wife’s blood and another they had both adopted. He may have sired no sons, but _all_ of his daughters were formidable, sensible, and fully-divine young women. No male _Olympian_ god could claim _that_ particular honor.

It had taken a long time, but Hades had eventually come to enjoy his current life. However, as time had passed and his petty jealousy lessened, the offenses he suffered at Zeus’s hands became increasingly more specific and personal. The first of these, possibly a sign for the future, began with the partition of his wife’s time away from him. Persephone was a newly-married woman, not a girl child still meant to live at home under her mother’s heel, but Zeus had not even split her time evenly. It had been decreed that Hades would only be allowed to have his wife for four months out of the year and Demeter would have her for the other eight. Zeus would never have stood for it, if it were _himself_ being confined to such restrictions, but Hades couldn’t do more than grit his teeth at the injustice of it all.

The second offense was a more direct attack on his realm than on his person. In his arrogant presumption that Hades’ sorting of souls was not only inefficient, but in _su_ fficient, Zeus had arranged for three regular human souls of his _own_ choosing to become judges of the Underworld. It was the first time Zeus had ever meddled directly with the management of Underworld affairs and Hades had been speechless with fury. Hades grudgingly accepted the change, but made sure Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus knew _exactly_ how much he distrusted their judgements of souls until they proved their worth to him, and him alone. That had ended up working out in the end, but it was the principle of the thing. Zeus didn’t try and tell _Poseidon_ how to manage the seas or tell him he was doing it wrong…

The _third_ offense… even the mere memory of it made him shake with barely suppressed rage and only his wish to not disturb Persephone’s tranquil sleep calmed him sufficiently. It was the absolute worst of Zeus’s four great offenses to Hades. He… had _dared_ to disguise himself as Hades… went to Persephone… then seduced her to _lay_ with him and he impregnated her… Hades had been inconsolable on her behalf. His wife’s honor had been besmirched and only Zeus begging on hands and knees before him had caused him to relent against unleashing the full might of the Underworld and declaring war upon Olympus. As compensation, Hades had demanded blood, pride, an adjustment of the terms to allow him six months with Persephone instead of four, and an oath upon the Styx that Zeus would never _dare_ seek to covet or actually possess another god’s wife, but it didn’t truly make up for the insult dealt to him or Persephone.

Had the third not occurred, the fourth and most recent offense he’d suffered would have been the most abhorrent to endure, for it affected him on both a personal _and_ business level. Zeus had arbitrarily decided it was time to review the Titans’ punishments, _pardoned_ them, including their wretched father, and in the next breath, _gifted_ Cronus with the management of Elysium in the Underworld, overstepping his boundaries exactly as he’d done with the judges without any input from Hades.

_Very_ harsh words had been spoken between him and Cronus then and he had not directly interacted with Cronus since, relying on others as his messengers if any communication was necessary. Not looking forward to the morning, Hades fell into a fitful sleep.

()()()()()

The Elysian sun brought forth the Underworld’s morning and after the royal couple awoke, it was filled with much grumbling on Hades’ part and much prodding and pointed glares on Persephone’s part. Hades had acceded to his wife’s request, but that didn’t make him any happier. Persephone knew that in normal circumstances, his given word was as good as any oath sworn upon the river Styx, but these were hardly normal circumstances. As such, she didn’t trust her husband to follow through until he actually did so.

With Aeacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus in place to judge the souls who came into the Underworld in his and Persephone’s absence and all other operations running smoothly, Hades had no reason to put off his meeting with Cronus any longer, though he dreaded it. He could feel Persephone’s eyes on him from one of the high windows of their palace home as he stepped out into the stone-paved courtyard just beyond the front doors and set out to the Elysian Fields. Her persistence paradoxically annoyed him and heartened him. His resolve to meet Cronus today may very well have faltered if he didn’t have her insistent support and he rather wished she was coming with him instead of just watching him go. Persephone was his queen and, unlike the other two queens, truly equal to him in status and power. She was not in any _more_ danger in Cronus’s direct presence than she was if she were at the far opposite end of the Underworld away from him. He understood why she wasn’t coming though. Despite the subject of the meeting to be had between them, Hades was not meeting Cronus as the Lord of the Underworld, but as the abandoned, resentful, grown-up son to the formerly-deposed, recently-acquitted tyrant father. Well, relatively recently-acquitted. It had been a couple centuries at least.

Hades thoughts so consumed him that he abruptly realized he’d arrived at the entrance to Elysium without taking in any of the scenery on the way. Gazing at the beautifully-wrought bronze gates barring entrance against those undeserving of paradise, Hades felt his fury surge forward anew like a trodden cobra and he seethed with indignant rage. He had _created_ Elysium as a memorial to his first love when she’d passed away centuries before he’d even known Persephone. Leuce’s death had shocked him, for she was a nymph and shouldn’t have died, but she was of the surface world and had never bonded herself to the Underworld’s land. It was the one thing she had refused to yield, though it had cost her life. The sharpness of his loss had long since faded to a pleasant ache, but Elysium had remained a treasured memory for him until _Zeus_ had arbitrarily installed _Cronus_ as Elysium’s _king!_ What _right_ did Zeus have to taint _his_ sacred place with the single most damning influence on his life?!

His teeth ground together in frustration at the injustice of it all and Hades stalked forward towards the bronze gates, which opened outward automatically in response to his presence. Naturally, he was the creator of Elysium after all and even if he weren’t, he was the King of the Underworld and could not be balked from venturing anywhere he so chose within his realm. Even the personal homes of the other residents were not impervious against his entrance, but simple courtesy (and a lack of need) prevented him from indulging in the invasion of their privacy.

Souls parted and bowed as he walked past, but he was so focused on reaching his destination, he didn’t even glance at them. The golden path he trod wound all about Elysium and led directly to the majestic, temple-like building serving as Cronus’s home. It was not bigger than his own palace, but it was as grand as any of those dedicated to the major Olympian gods and with the same aesthetic that clashed so horribly with the rest of the Underworld’s architecture. Hades stormed up the steps, not taking much effort to try and keep his feelings at bay. Doors would have been blasted open if there had been any and Hades continued onward in this furious stride until he at last stood in an open, circular chamber and Cronus was sitting on a throne on a slightly-raised dais. This was his own throne room, similar but not as impressive as Hades’ and it galled the death god to be standing before his father as though he were a mere supplicant in his own realm.

Cronus was there, sitting on his throne just as Hades had known he would be, however much he wished otherwise. He was garbed in a resplendent white robe with a golden cloak that hung off one shoulder and he wore an olive wreath as his crown. Where the crowns were concerned, Cronus took more after his youngest son, for Hades’ own crown was made of gold and inset with precious stones, primarily rubies and diamonds, his favorite gems. As for Hades' attire, he instead wore a voluminous black robe with long, flowing sleeves down to his wrists and a deep purple cloak, the color of royalty, that rested comfortably about his shoulders. Another important difference between the two monarchs lay in their hair. Cronus’s hair lay no farther than the base of his neck while his beard covered the top half of his chest, but Hades was the opposite. He had a beard, but only enough to cover his jawline and chin to distinguish him from youths, and his hair fell well past his shoulders to hang at his waist. This was intentional because apart from that, Hades was the spitting image of Cronus in his youth. They shared the same gray-blue eyes, straight black hair, tall and lean physique, and sharp-angled facial features. The uncanny resemblance disgusted Hades.

His father’s gray-blue eyes fell upon him in surprise and he watched his approach. Hades neither halted nor bowed, but strode directly to the dais and his brow furrowed deeper with every step. Cronus stood from his throne and stepped down so that the two god kings were on a level playing field. Even in height, they were matched.

“Let me make my position clear; I am not here to try and make amends with you,” Hades said immediately as he continued to glare at his father.

Cronus seemed unfazed by this declaration. “I hardly expected you to, Aidoneus.” That was the long version of his name that only the Titans and sometimes Hestia used. “You made that plain enough the last time we crossed words and I am not so old and senile as to think that a mere two centuries since my pardon would have softened your heart to me, if such a feat can even be accomplished.”

His tone was overtly polite, but Hades could hear the subtle implication and it angered him. His heart was not made of cold stone. Neither his wife nor his daughters would love him as much as they did if it was.

“I see being King of Elysium all this time hasn’t made you any less of a lurking viper,” he said icily.

“And you remain as unyieldingly stubborn as your older sisters, Demeter and Hera, and your dear mother,” Cronus retorted in the same even tone as before. “Spare me this idle banter, Aidoneus; I know how much you hate to waste words with me and that you would not be here in person if you had any other alternative. I already have some notion of what you wish to discuss.”

It didn’t even matter that everything he’d said was true, the automatic way Cronus had taken charge of the conversation and spoken so dismissively riled Hades far more than he would have liked.

“You may rule Elysium at Zeus’s behest, _Father_ , but _I_ rule over the entire Underworld and you would do well to remember that fact,” Hades growled. “Regardless, you are correct that I would not be here if I had any other choice.”

Cronus smirked a little. “It seems my favorite daughter-in-law is the more sensible of the two of you.”

Hades did not rise to the bait. “The Underworld is overcrowded with souls and I need to expand the borders of the realm. This is the best solution for the problem and it’s within my power to do so as the God of the Underworld, but there is a single _major_ point of contention that has prevented me from doing so decades sooner.”

Cronus’s smile widened. “Me.”

“You,” Hades agreed. “I don’t trust you, but Persephone believes I need to come to some kind of compromise with you for the sake of the realm.”

A scathing chuckle escaped Cronus’s lips. “To think you’re only here at the behest of a woman. How pathetic, Aidoneus.”

Hades smiled grimly with one eyebrow raised. “Why Father, I would have thought that _you_ of all people should have learned not to so readily dismiss the wills of women, or was it not Grandmother Gaea who encouraged you to rebel against your own father? Wasn’t it your own wife, my mother, who schemed to trick you into swallowing a stone to protect her youngest child?”

Cronus grimaced. Hades’ point was made. Women were not to be ignored or summarily dismissed as inferior. Cronus quickly regained his composure and said, “Then you’ve come here in vain, Aidoneus. You will not compromise with one you do not trust.”

Now it was Cronus who’d made a valid point and Hades scowled. “There is nothing you can say that will make me trust you.”

“I know,” Cronus said with a solemn nod. “I have done nothing to earn it.”

Hades’ brow furrowed in a deeper glare. “If this is some new tactic of yours to try and make me believe you’ve reformed and are worthy of greater power, then you’ll find yourself sorely disappointed.”

Cronus shook his head and spread his arms wide, palms up. “Aidoneus, don’t you think I’d know better than to try something like that on you? You’re far too suspicious for me to waste my time on a tactic that would be guaranteed to fail.”

There was that, and it wasn’t even flattery, just plain truth. Still though, his father’s somber demeanor only seemed to infuriate Hades even more. “Why are you acting so nonchalant about this?! Why are you being so open and accepting of my distrust of you instead of trying to convince me to be otherwise when it would mean gaining more power?!” he snapped.

Cronus’s gray-blue eyes bored into his. “Simply because you do not believe that I can change, that I _have_ changed, and what’s the point in saying anything at all when everything I say is suspect? If I lie, then it confirms what you’ve always believed of me, and if I tell the truth, it’s only to facilitate my eventual seizure of power once more.”

Hades said nothing. The words had the ring of authenticity. There was no deception at work here.

Cronus sighed and looked away at a spot somewhere on the ceiling above and past Hades. “You should go now, Aidoneus. Return to your wife and find an alternative solution to the Underworld’s overpopulation plight. Expanding the Underworld’s borders would be the simplest solution, but you will not risk your peace of mind by giving me near-complete autonomy over Elysium. Maybe in another millennium you would be more willing to consider the notion, but that level of compromise is simply beyond you right now.”

Hades gaped at him, unable to believe his ears. He had agreed to meet Cronus at Persephone’s insistence with the expectation that he would be mentally sparring with Cronus, and there had been a bit of that, but the lust for power he had been prepared to deal with was not there. And without obtaining any of it or making a ploy for acquiring it in the future, Cronus had dismissed him like a child. It insulted him greatly, like he was somehow incapable of behaving maturely.

“We’re not done here, Cronus,” Hades said stiffly.

Cronus turned his gaze back to him looking mildly perplexed. “How so? You won’t do anything, so what more is there to say that hasn’t already been said? I know you, Aidoneus.”

Hades offered him a grim smirk. “Not as well as you’d like to, perhaps. You’re right that I still don’t trust you, and I don’t think I ever will, but the sanctity of my kingdom is more important than my own personal demons. I am the ultimate king of this realm, no matter how many underlings my authority is delegated to, and if there ever comes a time that I find myself in a position where I am no longer in touch with every far-flung corner of my realm, then I will no longer be fit as King of the Underworld anyway.”

Without warning, Hades grabbed Cronus’s hand and wished his wife to join him before he teleported himself and his father directly to the throne room via his inherent shadow powers. He released his hand as soon as they were solid, and the shadow of Persephone materialized then solidified next to him shortly afterward.

She noticed Cronus next to him, raised an eyebrow, and gave him a questioning look. “Not that I’m displeased with Cronus’s presence, but why did you bring him here?”

He smiled lovingly at her. “I’ve decided to compromise after all.”

She smiled back in adoration, but said nothing and Hades closed his eyes. He tuned everything out of his immediate, conscious awareness and cast his mind far across the realm. He became distantly aware of the stone palace and Persephone’s gardens, the rivers of Styx, Cocytus, Acheron, Lethe, and Phlegethon, the Fields of Asphodel, Elysium, and Punishment, the double doors of the Oneroi of dreams, the spider web abode of the Fates, the gaping Pit that led far down into the darkest depths of infernal Tartarus, and the splendid Isles of the Blessed reserved for heroes and those souls who’d won the right to Elysium in three different lifetimes when they’d chosen reincarnation. He could feel fiery-bearded Phlegethon and sluggish Cocytus tossing condemned souls in their currents with reckless abandon as if they were a part of his own flesh and he could feel all the other gods and spirits in the Underworld, from as near as Persephone and Cronus right beside him to Selene, the Titan goddess of the moon, who was sleeping in her abode just on the fringe of the Underworld while Helios was riding across the sky on his sun chariot. He could sense the presence of every soul in every stage of their processing from those waiting on the banks of the Styx, unable to pay Charon, to those already residing in their proper eternity, and everything in-between from their judgment to the expiation of sin. Everything he could see, could hear, could feel, and could sense was his to own, to rule, to be. He was not born to the Underworld the way his daughters were, but it was as intrinsic to his very essence as the sky was to Uranus or the night to Nyx, the sun to Helios and the darkness to Erebus. Hades was, in name and in fact, the Underworld itself.

Hades exerted his tremendous will upon _every_ single being present, both mortals and immortals alike, and held them tightly in place wherever they stood in the midst of whatever action they had been participating in. All activity halted and dimensional barriers always kept open where instantly slammed shut with no one allowed to come in or out. Drastic changes were about to take place and he had no intention of losing anyone in the cracks as he reshaped the realm once more. In the early days of his rule, trying to force the Underworld to bend to his will had been a colossal nightmare and oftentimes a fruitless endeavor as it naturally sprung back to the chaotic state he had inherited, unwilling to be tamed. He’d despaired that he’d never fashion it to his liking. Thousands of years older now, he was wise to the Underworld’s nature for it was an inseparable aspect of his own and only his slightest inclination had the Underworld’s dimension of reality obeying his every command.

His first act was the official unification of the Fields of Punishment with Tartarus. This was a simple thing to do, a formality more than anything and only required a merging of the two sub-dimensional boundaries. They were often perceived as one and the same, but this had not been true until now. The Fields of Punishment were more like the antechamber for Tartarus with Tartarus itself being reserved for the truly horrific and the most irredeemable of sinners. This was the eternal prison reserved especially for the enemies of the gods.

His second act required more effort, but was visually more apparent than it was dimensionally so. Hades hauled the Isles of the Blessed next to Elysium and dissolved their barriers, binding them together. The large land mass had seemed to float across the water like a mere skiff to the Elysian coastline and merged into it so that one could no longer tell where Elysium had previously ended and the Isles of the Blessed had once begun. Historically, Elysium and the Isles of the Blessed had always been two distinct places and this new merge was sure to befuddle both mortals and immortals.

However, Hades felt the merger had been a long time in coming and should have ideally taken place much sooner. He had admittedly created the Isles of the Blessed mostly on a whim so he wouldn’t have to deal with Zeus and the other gods whining at him about their impressively foolhardy demigod sons being forced to forget all their heroic deeds and be reincarnated into a possibly monotonous life. Creating Elysium afterward in honor of Leuce had rendered the necessity for the Isles of the Blessed entirely moot and only habit had prevented him from doing something about it earlier. Now the Isles of the Blessed were gone forever, permanently a part of Elysium.

And now, the time had come for the difficult part. The other two tasks had been maintenance work, now he was getting into the expansion work. He instinctively reached out with both hands and clasped two different ones in his own. In his right hand, he held his father’s and in his left, he held his wife’s. He felt them complete the circle without his direction, and the essence of his power concentrated in that closed loop and it surged through him and their joined hands. First the tremors began and they quickly escalated into violent shaking felt throughout the realm. Cronus and Persephone stumbled about due to their uneven footing and glanced fearfully about the throne room as if it would collapse on them any second, but they never lost their grip on Hades’ hands. Hades himself was completely unperturbed by his surroundings and seemed hardly aware of them. His feet never once left the ground and his balance remained steady. He was the focal point of which the entire realm was beginning to change.

The primal elements of nature: fire, earth, air, and water are supreme forces. The tumultuous oceans, the monstrous volcanos, the implacable earthquakes, and the vicious tornados are mere examples of nature’s absolute power and they all affect each other in drastic ways. The hurricane is the offspring of fierce winds and warm ocean water, but water constantly erodes the land wherever it runs its course. Nothing is immutable. The proud mountain pushes up high into the sky in its youth and time will eventually weather it back down into a flat plain.

What Hades was doing to the Underworld was something far more impressive. Anyone looking upon the Underworld from just beyond it would be dumbstruck with awe at what was taking place. Elysium, now also comprising of the Isles of the Blessed, was rising. It was not being ripped out of the land as Elysium rose, for the land was not of the three-dimensional plane, but there was the distinct sense that Elysium was rising higher than everything else. It rose, but stopped after a while and then it began to shift sideways like it was sliding on ice. It slid smoothly, neither rising nor falling, right over top of Asphodel. With a jolt, as if an invisible giant were struggling to pick up something monstrously heavy, Asphodel _and_ Elysium together, were both lifted upwards in tandem and now Elysium was _up_ , Tartarus _down_ , and Asphodel was somewhere in-between. It was a feat the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Age of the Titans, nay the Age of the Protogenoi.

Sweat beaded heavily on Hades’ brow and his hands gripped tightly to those he was still holding. A chain used to hold a heavy beam in place had to first be removed if any adjustments were going to be made, but that beam’s weight would still need to be supported in the meantime. That was exactly what Hades was doing right now. He had released the ‘locks’ on the various boundary’s borders, so to speak in order to make the necessary adjustments to the 'chains', but he had to support the dimension and weight of the realm while he did so. It was taking him a massive amount of energy and concentration to keep everything together, solid, and real yet still make the necessary changes. Never before, not even when he had first created Asphodel and the Fields of Punishment in the early, unruly years of his rule, had he ever undertaken such a monumental operation.

With Elysium and Asphodel hovering uncertainly above the rest of the Underworld, Hades gritted his teeth in a silent snarl, gathered them together with the fabric of Tartarus into his hands, and stretched them. It didn’t go quickly or easily. The three soul residences resisted the pull in the same way that muscles unused to exercise do. They slowly gave way to the lord’s stubborn will. Slowly, Tartarus filled in the dimensional space that Asphodel and Elysium had just occupied. Slowly, Asphodel and Elysium grew until they were perfect equal sizes to Tartarus. If Asphodel and Elysium had been released to drop back down on top of Tartarus, you would only see Elysium with no trace of the other two hidden underneath.

By now, Hades had collapsed to his knees without his conscious awareness of it, he was panting heavily, and his back was soaked, but he did not dare let go now. Elysium, Asphodel, and Tartarus were now the size that he wanted them to be, but they would snap back to their original size and position in a flash if he dared to relax his grip. He fashioned some temporary boundary restraints on the width dimensions of the upper two soul residences to take away some of the pressure and it helped a little, but not enough to make a real difference. What _did_ help was locking in both the width and depth dimensions of Tartarus and releasing it from his control. Tartarus already existed as deep down as the second dimension could go, and there was nothing more he could do to it except shrink it, which he had no intention of doing. Tartarus’s expansion was now complete.

With one of the soul residences completely freed from his conscious, he felt his second wind coming and he mentally braced himself for this last great exertion. Hades gave a massive heave and the two soul residences soared upward through the dimensional plane, farther and farther up away from the Underworld proper.

On approaching the middle, he quickly released Asphodel with some temporary boundaries to keep it in place without losing inertia in his movement of Elysium. Only when Hades had reached the definite upper half of the realm did he stop moving Elysium. As he had already done with the width dimensions, Hades stretched Elysium as far up as Tartarus was down, to the very topmost edge of the dimension, and stretched it downward until its volume matched that of Tartarus. As soon as he had reached that exact size, Hades locked the depth dimension barriers and replaced the temporary lock on the width with the stronger, more permanent barriers that would shore up and support the entirety of Elysium without any effort on his part. The expansion and relocation of Elysium was finished too.

With two done, Hades returned his full attention to Asphodel. The actual pulling of Asphodel’s fabric of reality upward to the border of the Elysium and downward to the border of Tartarus was no easier than stretching it width-wise, but he didn’t have to think as much about making sure Asphodel was exactly centered since he had already measured the uppermost and lowermost soul residences. It was impossible for Asphodel to be too far up or too far down. Once he had finished, he locked Asphodel’s new dimensions as he had done with the other two and for good measure, he added magic chains to these invisible boundaries weaving between Asphodel and Tartarus, and Asphodel and Elysium, binding them together to both strengthen the borders and keep them from shifting out of alignment. Nobody would be able to sense these bonds except for him as the creator and the master of the Underworld, though calling it the ‘ _Under_ world’ would now be a misnomer.

Satisfied at last that his work was complete, Hades relaxed… and toppled to the ground unconscious.

()()()()()

When Hades woke up, he found himself lying on one of the nice couches in his library that sometimes served as an office for informal meetings.

He was momentarily puzzled as to how he’d gotten there and why, until he remembered in a sudden bolt of clarity and shot upright in alarm, shouting, “Cronus!”

“I’m here, Aidoneus.”

Wild-eyed and not any more reassured for hearing the voice, Hades turned to its source and saw Cronus sitting in one of the plush red velvet armchairs a scant ten feet away. In the same motion, his gray-blue eyes had caught Persephone in their sights sitting in a chair she had pulled up beside him. He did not focus on her, too intent was he on Cronus, but his awareness of her presence calmed him significantly. Hades stared at Cronus the same way one might stare at one of the phantom apparitions that accompanied his daughter, Melinoe.

“Why?” Hades said after a while.

Cronus gave a half-shrug. “Whether you believe it or not, I was worried and-”

“-That’s not what I’m asking,” Hades said shortly, cutting him off. “I was severely weakened and distracted by the expansion and translocation of the soul residences, admittedly more so than I originally thought I would. If you had decided to kill me then, or even just cripple me, I could not have stopped you, even if I had been aware of your intent. You could not have had a more perfect opportunity to bring me down and you will likely never have such an opportunity again. Why didn’t you attack me?”

Cronus met his gaze head on, gray-blue into matching gray-blue. “I will not lie to you, Aidoneus, but you will not believe the truth, so I will say nothing.”

Cronus had used a similar line earlier today, and Hades hadn't pushed it. He hadn't cared to listen. Hadn't been interested. “Tell me,” Hades insisted.

It was the first time Hades had expressed such interest, so Cronus relented. “Because I did not want to.”

Hades didn’t believe him. Still, he persisted. “Why not?” And he hated how much he sounded like a child demanding to understand the way the world worked.

“I’m not a young god anymore, Aidoneus, and the world above is not the one of my youth. It has changed with the times and I have changed with it despite my wishes. Consider this, what would I truly gain from instigating a revolt now and making a bid to seize the power I once had? Glory? Peace? Love? Prosperity? Hardly. It took a measly ten years, an eyeblink in an immortal life, for six foundling gods and goddesses as fresh-faced and naïve as children, with a few toys gifts from the Cyclopes and a handful of Titan and monster allies, to bring about the end of my reign. You still remember me as this formidable, indominable monster because you yourself were so young and inexperienced. You knew neither yourself, your powers, nor the very world around you and you had to learn it all very fast or risk death. You have all grown immensely since the Titanomachy while I have stagnated in Tartarus, if not been degraded by my tenure, and I have no allies, or insufficient numbers of them at least, who would be able and willing to assist me in any potential conquest. The terrifying war you believe would take place if I tried to unseat you would never come to pass. I have nothing to gain from engaging in a war I know I cannot win.”

Hades had heard similar reasoning before, but this was the first time that he was really listening to the words his father said, instead of just letting them pass through one ear and out the other. He was listening and strangely, he believed him.

It was in the light of this truth that Hades stood up from the couch, still staring at his father, and said, “Cronus, I want you to rule as King of Elysium.”

Cronus and Persephone startled at this proclamation, staring at him in dumbfounded amazement for different but similar reasons. Hades had tolerated Cronus’s appointment by Zeus, but had never expressed anything more than bitter hatred and disgust towards said appointment. Cronus was amazed that his eldest son, who just that morning had still been hostile towards him, now believed that he had changed and was offering him the chance to prove himself. Persephone was amazed because Hades’ declaration to Cronus was done in the exact same style that he had used on Aeacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus when he had personally accepted them as his judges. This was Hades’ mark of favor towards Cronus. It was not forgiveness by any means, but it was acceptance and that was just as good.

Realizing his mouth was hanging open, Cronus closed it and bowed his head to his son and monarch. “I am honored, Lord Aidoneus.”

A bright white light seemed to pour out and coalesce about Hades as he spoke again. “It will not be like your prior stint of ruling Elysium. I am gifting you with more autonomy in how you choose to organize Elysium. I will still retain the ultimate authority over Elysium as I am still the God of Souls and the Lord of the Underworld, but my own power will not be felt as keenly there. Don’t give me cause to regret this trust.”

As he finished, the white light seemed to fade from Hades and instead shone out brilliantly from around Cronus. It shone blinding and intense like Helios, but it didn’t hurt to look at. The light was warm and full of purity, truth, love, and goodness. The light faded from view, but the aura of divine goodness still seemed to exist about Cronus’s person.

“Yes…! Yes, I will not fail you,” Cronus exclaimed, staring at his hands in utter bewilderment as if he could still see that warm white light in them.

Hades accepted this with a nod and turned to Persephone. “Persephone, my beloved wife, you have always unofficially taken up the mantle, but I wish to formalize it now. Would you be the Queen of Asphodel?”

“What?” Persephone exclaimed, unable to think of a more coherent response.

“I am delegating the management of soul residences, as I knew I would have to when I decided to expand their borders across the vertical space, as well as the horizontal,” Hades explained. “All three of them are now too big and too populated for you and I to manage on our own. As I said, you have always taken it upon yourself to offer the relief of forgetfulness and to ease the lingering earthly sorrows of suffering in the souls of Asphodel while I have always been more focused on the administration of punishment and repentance of the damned souls in the Fields of Punishment. You are still Queen of the Underworld and lose none of your prerogatives as such, but I feel it would be best to make such singular responsibilities more official. Do you accept this, Persephone?”

Persephone considered and then nodded her head. “Yes, Hades, I’ll become the official Queen of Asphodel.”

“Leaving me as the official King of Tartarus on top of all my other titles,” Hades said with a wry smile and Persephone grinned in response.

There was no transfer of power as there had been from Hades to Cronus. Persephone and Hades both already possessed the powers to deal with either of the two soul residences. However, something curious happened. A faint gray mist briefly appeared and covered Persephone from head to toe, and when Hades looked down at himself, he saw reddish-orange flames surrounding his body. They were as dark as the light that had infused Cronus was bright and felt the opposite. Instead of pleasant warmth, they and the light they produced were paradoxically both scorching hot and icy cold, and they were malevolent, deceptive, and hateful, the essence of pure, unadulterated evil. Hades shuddered, but the flames around him soon vanished as did the mist around Persephone.

She must have felt something too because she kept staring at her hands, clenching them into fists, looked back up at him with a confused frown, and then returned to staring at her hands again. Whatever she had experienced, Persephone was just as unsettled as he was. Hades decided to put it from his mind for now. Only time would tell what the consequences of his actions here today would bring about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OMG, nobody died in this one. I've always seen the Underworld as Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell all combined together in one location, even if it's underground like Hell. Movies always make Hades parallel Satan, but since there's no being that rules Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, there's no parallel for him in Christian mythology. That being said, I figured Hades would be an instrumental figure in the division of the three realms and the creation of the Offices of Good and Evil. The fact that Hades is already underground and Cronus is already King of Elysium made it too perfect not to do it.
> 
> Also, I find myself happily further justified in assigning Hades the Office of Evil by rereading "On a Pale Horse" recently. Satan (who is Parry, who only became Evil in the 1200s) tells the Irish ghost (Molly?) to leave his "private life" out of things when Zane tours Hell and she brings up Persephone after warning Zane not to eat food or drink in Hell/the Underworld. Obviously, Persephone wasn't in Parry's private life, but she couldn't have been in "Satan's" either unless the Office of Evil had, at some point, belonged to Hades!
> 
> Holy crap, lots of Greek mythology references are in play here, and it does not help that Hades/Persephone are my OTP so I've researched the hell out of them. I'll try and sum up some of them.
> 
> 1) Cronus is a Titan and the father of Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Cronus was king after deposing his own father, Uranus (at his own mother Gaea's request), and there was a prophecy that he would be overthrown by his own son. To prevent that from happening, Cronus had the bright idea to swallow all of his children after they were born. With the last child, Rhea, his wife, tricked him into swallowing a stone instead of Zeus, so Zeus got to grow up mostly normal instead of inside Cronus's belly. After he'd grown up, he tricked Cronus into throwing up his siblings and the began the ten-year war between Cronus's offspring and the Titans, called the Titanomachy.
> 
> 2) The abduction myth of Hades and Persephone is very famous with lots of variations, but I mostly go with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Persephone is abducted by Hades to be his wife, Persephone's mother Demeter in grief for her daughter and anger at the gods, causes winter, Persephone eats some pomegranate seeds from the Underworld, and she's required to go back there for four months of the year. Some versions of the story say she has to go back for six. I decided to compromise and have it start with four, then adjust it to six.
> 
> 3) The story of Melinoe's existence is not well-known as she's barely a minor character and only appears once or twice. I don't have anything more to expand on than what's written. Zeus came to Persephone disguised as Hades and impregnated her with his child. I figure Hades is the type of man who would be more furious at Zeus fucking his wife than his wife being pregnant with another man's child. Macaria is even more minor. She's the goddess of blessed death and she's only described as Hades' daughter. I decided she's probably Persephone's too. Speaking of children, in some stories, the Furies or Erinyes are described to be children of Hades and Persephone. Since they are my OTP, I went with this version. Another child of theirs is Adonis. Apparently after he was born, Aphrodite gave Adonis to Persephone in a chest and asked her to take care of him, saying she'd come back when he was older. Ehh, the myth says she loved him, but I interpret it as parental love. Nobody mentions that Hades probably helped raise him for some reason.
> 
> 4) So apparently, the only reason Hades has Aeacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus as judges is because Zeus decreed them so. I had no idea, and I also had no idea that there are some myths where Cronus is actually pardoned and instated as King of Elysium. I imagine Hades wasn't too happy with that arrangement for a while.
> 
> 5) Leuce! She's a nymph that Hades loved, and she seems to have existed before his marriage to Persephone. She died, becoming a white poplar tree, and Hades created Elysium as a memorial to her.


	5. Thanatos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Geez, this chapter was 23 pages long in a Word document. How do I manage to write so much?!

It was winter and bitterly cold, made more so by the night air, the white frost on the ground, and the sharp wind that cut right to the bone. A swooshing sound briefly interrupted the frigid tranquility and feathers rustled. A bird? A figure clad in a long black cloak seemed to materialize out of thin air and was striding towards a small village. Nobody was out to have noticed his arrival, but they would have marked him as odd if they had. He was not a local, yet he carried no provisions on him to suggest long days of hard winter travel, but what was even stranger was that he made no sound as he walked. The dry brown grass covered in frost should have crackled beneath his feet, but they did not. He was like a ghost.

In this day and age, this stranger’s identity as a ghost is a very believable explanation, and they are especially common in winter when Nature tests the perseverance of every living thing. Those who survive to see the next spring have passed her test and may live to see yet another year of their lives, Fate permitting. Ghosts could be frightening, but they were only either shades of those recently departed that had not yet been herded by Hermes to the Underworld or the shades of those waiting on the banks of the Styx, unable to pay for crossing, who ventured out into the surface world under the cover of darkness accompanying Hecate, the Goddess of Witchcraft (including necromancy) or Melinoe, the Goddess of Ghosts and their appeasements.

The average person might believe this stranger to be a ghostly specter dressed in the color of mourning, but a closer look at him from a certain type of person would instantly perceive his true nature and become all the more horrified by his presence. This was not a being to take lightly.

The dark-robed stranger stopped just outside one of the tiny huts and gazed upon it with quiet solemnity. He was tall and quite broad, for his head and shoulders would be just able to clear the doorway if he entered. A hand extended outward from within the folds of his cloak towards the door knob. The sight of it would have caused anyone to start in alarm. His hand was long, thin, and bone-white like a skeleton. It was fleshed, but only in the way that the emaciated are still fleshed. The door opened at his lightest touch and he slipped through the entrance as quiet as a breath of air before closing the door behind him. Had the door even been locked? Who could say? It certainly wasn’t now.

This phantom-like stranger did not tiptoe through the house, but he was quieter than a mouse as he moved with ease to the back with an assurance that suggested he knew his direction, though he had never been in this house before. The back room in the house that he had been aiming for was the kitchen and lying next to the cooking hearth, with a dying fire burning feebly in the grate, were two figures. One was an adult and the other was clearly a young child to judge by size. They were a woman and a boy of about six, probably a mother and son, and both covered in layers of clothes and blankets, but especially the boy. The blankets and clothes hid their figures from view, but their sickly pallor and their gaunt faces suggested their thinness. They looked dead, but they were not. They were merely sleeping, but they would not wake again.

The stranger sighed and pulled back his hood. The face that gazed out was ghastly. It was as gaunt as the mother and son sleeping at the hearth and his skin was the same bone-white of his hands. Sunken-in, fathomless black eyes studied the pair with something like regret and the only thing that seemed to distinguish his face from that of a skull was the wild mass of black hair on his head. It was unkempt and long, growing like a bush out of his head, but it didn’t fall any farther down than his neck. His beard was the same: thick, unruly, and just long enough to cover his neck in the front. The cloak rustled like feathers at his back, seemingly of its own accord, and two enormous black wings extended in an obvious stretch before lying flat against his back once more, blending in completely with the black cloak.

If the mother and son had been awake, this is the face and figure they would have seen and they would have recognized him immediately, to their horror, though they have never seen the likes of this man before. Only a certain kind of people at a certain time can perceive his true nature, but everyone knows Death when he comes calling. Death is a necessary counterpart to life, but it’s not pretty, and neither is Thanatos.

Thanatos approached the sleeping people and frowned in frustration as he stared into their souls with his dark eyes. He was the God of Nonviolent Death, his sisters, the Keres, being Goddesses of Violent Death, and until recently, both of these souls would have been his to reap with his scythe without question. Then, with their souls cut free from their mortal bodies, they would linger on Earth for a while until Hermes found them and herded them to the Underworld to be sorted into their proper soul residence, but things weren’t so simple anymore. He sympathized with his monarchs’ and in-laws’ need to expand the borders of the Underworld- the Afterlife to compensate for the overpopulation of souls, but solving that problem had created a whole host of other ones in its place about how to transport and judge souls accordingly to make sure they didn’t end up in the wrong eternity.

Lords Cronus and Hades and Lady Persephone had been working for the past few decades on assigning actual weights to the souls for sins and good deeds to help facilitate their classification. Lord Cronus had also been advocating for a revision of the definitions that distinguished which souls were assigned to which residence, putting more emphasis on these assigned weights of good and evil on the soul. This aspect was still being hotly debated between Lords Cronus and Hades because while Lord Cronus reasoned that this would make Elysium less of an exclusive club, Lord Hades argued by the same point that it would mean more souls would end up in Tartarus that didn’t truly deserve to be there. And while all this was going on, people still continued to die, had to be delivered to the Afterlife, and had to be sorted to their respective eternity.

Thanatos had worked for Lord Hades since his arrival in the Underworld as his new king and under the original system, Thanatos knew that these two souls before him would have both been assigned to Asphodel. They were neither evil nor particularly good, as was most of humanity, but under the new system of classification that Lord Cronus was advocating for, with sin and good deeds accumulating weight according to each act and its motive, the boy would be bound for Elysium, but the mother… He couldn’t tell with her. The weight of evil and good on her soul was almost even. She could be sent to Asphodel or she could end up on the fringe edges of Elysium or Tartarus. It had been so much easier when all souls were sent to one place and would be judged once they reached the second dimension instead of having to be judged before they even got there. He never had conundrums like this with the previous system.

“Macaria, I need your help,” he murmured, his voice as soft and somber as the grave.

At first, nothing happened, but a few minutes later, he could hear the faint sound of hooves clopping down the road just outside. It was the tread of a Deathsteed that only Death and those associated with it could hear. The hoofbeats stopped and all was silent again, then a small woman suddenly appeared in the kitchen from out of the shadows like fine mist. Her skin was not the same skeletal white as his, but still fair and very pale. A dark curtain of straight black hair hung down her back just past her hips, and her serene face with her round gray-blue eyes took in everything from his presence to the two dying mortals by the hearth. Except for her short stature, Macaria, the youngest of Lord Hades’ daughters, was every inch her father’s child in looks and manner, and she was his wife, the Goddess of Blessed Death.

This distinction was evident in her choice of clothing. While he was dressed head-to-toe in all-black, Macaria wore a long white dress that started to darken at the level of her knees and was pitch-black by the time the color reached the hem. It hung off her shoulders, held in place by a stiff band of royal purple trim, and leaving her white skin bare. The sleeves were just as long and flowy as the dress with wide openings like chasms and more of this stiffer purple fabric was used to hold the sleeves in place on her arms just below her shoulders. Just like the skirt part of the dress, the white sleeves began to darken from the point just past the elbow right up to the same royal purple trim also at the end of the sleeve.

These faint traces of purple in her clothes were her mark as a member of the Underworld royal family, but it was not the only one. She also wore golden arm bands over the purple arm trip to further assist with holding the sleeves in place. She also wore something that resembled a gold, metal spider with its upside-down triangle body placed in the center of the purple band supporting her dress just above her breasts. There it rested and its six legs dipped down between the valley of her breasts with two branching off to the side just underneath their curvature, two more branching off a little further down at the end of her ribs, and the last two curving away to the side at her waistline. This strange contraption resembled an odd pair of ribs, but it had the combined effect of further supporting the dress from slipping down and highlighting Macaria’s marvelous figure. Personally, Thanatos found it rather erotic. Around her neck, Macaria wore a string of golden squares around her neck with odd designs that didn’t seem to mean anything but that she wore for ‘personal reasons’, as she always told him with a sly wink whenever he asked. Her secrecy about it amused him for he was sure the story behind it was silly, childish, and inconsequential, but she pretended it was otherwise. That playfulness and her gentleness were the only two qualities she had seemed to inherit from her mother.

If the purple had not been enough to distinguish her as a goddess of royalty, then the sheer amount of gold she wore on a daily basis should have been, but just in case it wasn’t, Macaria also wore a gold diadem, a coronet made of tiny metal rings with a single white diamond in the shape of a teardrop dangling from the center of her forehead. The diadem was unmistakable proof of royalty and both diamonds and rubies were Lord Hades’ gem of choice. His wife adored her father so much she practically worshipped him. She wanted everyone who met her to know at a glance that she was Lord Hades’ daughter and that she was not a woman to be trifled with. Lord Hades’ daughters had a reputation for being quite fearsome.

“Macaria, what’s the most recent word from your parents and grandfather on the current classification system?” Thanatos asked her.

Macaria huffed angrily and spread her hands wide. When she spoke, her voice was lilting and soft like a lullaby. “Father’s finally caved in to Grandfather’s wish and is allowing a trial period of ten years with the new soul classification system to see how it compares. You were right to call me for this boy’s soul.”

Thanatos quailed in despair. “Ten _years_ of this?”

Macaria bit her lip and nodded gravely.

Really, ten years wasn’t that much in an immortal lifetime, especially for a being like him, who was a son of Nyx and even older than Lord Hades, but this new system complicated things too much. The truth of the matter was there were now too many humans for Hermes to bring all the departed souls to the Afterlife and he was not qualified to decide which soul residence they should go to. He could not see the good and evil in souls the way he, Macaria, Lord Hades, Lady Persephone, and now Lord Cronus could. It was not his job to judge souls and he had too many other responsibilities anyway. He and Macaria had tried to fill in the gap Hermes had vacated, but the increased death count meant they had less time to take souls to their proper eternity, so there were more ghosts than ever wandering around on Earth right now. On top of all that, Thanatos could reap any souls, as long as they weren’t the victims of battle, murder, suicide, ravaging diseases, or accidents, without affecting their balance, but the souls that Macaria took were automatically marked for Elysium, regardless of whether they’d truly earned it. The fact that Elysium _had_ been an exclusive reward meant she’d been as busy and had more time to bring souls to the proper part of the Afterlife. With this new trial period though, more souls would qualify for Elysium which meant more reaping work for her and less time shepherding souls. It was too much for two people; how were they going to manage like this for ten years, much less eternity if Lord Hades decided he ended up preferring this system? The Earth would be overrun with ghosts!

“What are we going to do?” he asked, the future implications weighed heavy in his words.

She shrugged and shook her head. “What _can_ we do, Thanatos?”

Thanatos didn’t have an answer for her. There was none. Macaria brushed up against him as she moved past him to kneel down on the hearth before the dying boy. She did not use a scythe to separate the souls from the body like he did. Instead, she just reached out to the center of his chest with her hand and it passed right through the blankets as if she were nothing more than an insubstantial spirit. Her arm stopped moving forward and with hardly a pause, she drew her arm back until her hand was visible. Her index finger was crooked like a hook and on the end of her finger being drawn out of the small body was a transparent, gauzy, web-like substance, the essence of the boy’s soul. It kept on stretching until at last it snapped, breaking its last hold on life, and the rest of the soul came free with ease: limp, insubstantial, and only vaguely humanoid in shape.

The soul didn’t have any mass, but it did have volume, so Macaria rolled it up into a tight ball, reached into the ether the way Thanatos had seen Lord Hades do a hundred times to summon his scepter or his Helmet of Darkness, and brought forth a brown knapsack. She stuffed the soul inside it and slung it over her back. Apparently, she stored it away in the ether when she didn’t have any souls inside it. Thanatos had his own knapsack for the souls he collected, but he didn’t always have time to collect the souls he harvested. These days especially, he just had to slice and go on to the next one. Moments of quiet respite like this were increasingly rare for him.

Macaria looked back at the starving mother next to her now dead son and grimaced. “Her soul’s in balance. She could go to any of the soul residences.”

Thanatos nodded and drew his scythe as he knelt down next to the woman. “Are the monarchs preoccupied right now?”

Macaria smirked suddenly. “It may be daylight down in Tartarus when it’s nighttime in the mortal world, but with Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus as judges holding down the fort in the case of any mysterious absences, Mother’s probably taking advantage of it also being nighttime in Asphodel to drag Father away from the bureaucracy for some ‘fun’.” Her smirk suddenly faltered and her gaze turned somber. “Father won’t say anything, but he’s having a hard time adjusting to the loss of Elysium and Asphodel.”

Thanatos wasn’t surprised to hear this. He was sure there was a lot of reorganization that Lord Hades had to do on his end too. The reaping, sorting, and delivery of souls was only a part of the entire death process. Thanatos peered directly into the woman’s soul, sighted the main anchor tying the soul to the body, and cleaved it deftly with one swift stroke. Without it, the secondary anchors disappeared and the soul promptly fell out of the body like a puppet whose strings have been cut and Thanatos scooped it up off the ground, rolling it up as Macaria had done, and shoved it into his knapsack. There were four souls already in there. Two of them were in balance and two were destined for Tartarus.

“In that case, I’ll see if I can gather some more souls while I’ve still got time and I’ll go down to Tartarus to meet the judges so they can give me a reading on where to put this woman and the other two balanced souls I’ve got with me.”

Macaria nodded, and then squeezed his shoulder in an affectionate gesture. It may have seemed spontaneous to an outsider, but she had sensed his frustration and offered her reassurance. Thanatos could read souls just fine. He could see the good and evil perfectly and even tell what kind of deeds had been committed, but his abilities weren’t so fine-tuned to determine the difference between just-barely-qualify-for-Elysium-or-Tartarus and Asphodel. This was why Asphodel needed to exist so that souls weren’t caught up in the minutia of being not quite good or evil enough. Mostly he worried about the souls on the edge of Tartarus and Asphodel. The former Fields of Punishment were horrible for reason and the true Tartarus was even worse. Only the truly wicked deserved that punishment. But, Thanatos had to remind himself, Tartarus was still the place where sins were expiated and repentance was delivered. Souls that only just barely qualified as damned would repent their sins quickly enough and then would be delivered to Asphodel where he felt they truly belonged.

The Death couple departed from the house with their souls in tow and Macaria’s pale white Death horse, whom she’d affectionately named Mortis, nickered at the two of them. Macaria smiled fondly at the animal and patted his nose while gazing into his soulful brown eyes, promising him a tiny handful of rich green alfalfa hay when they got home. A white horse was not an unusual sight, but his heritage made the white color an oddity. He was borne of a union of one of Nyx’s two night mares with Helios’s dominant day stallion, and the result was this young white death stallion. Macaria had taken an instant liking to the colt as soon as she’d laid eyes on him within the first 24 hours of his birth. Her affinity for her father’s night stallions may have precluded her liking for him, but the bond was true and Mortis was hers as much as she was his. She even claimed the death horse could talk, like Cerberus, and that he was just shy which was why he wasn’t too vocal. He wasn’t sure he believed that. Cerberus _could_ talk, but he was also a son of Typhon and Echidna, the Mother of Monsters, so that didn’t count. Thanatos humored her anyway though, especially since Mortis was smart enough he acted like he _could_ understand every word they were saying.

Speaking of Mortis, the huge equine’s ears suddenly perked up and he turned his great head around down one end of the road out of the village. Alerted to his wary stiffness, Macaria and Thanatos looked in the same direction, wondering what had caused him to react.

“It’s Melinoe and her train of ghosts?” Macaria asked in that way that told Thanatos she was somehow having her silent communication with Mortis and not speaking directly to him.

However, alerted to this possibility, Thanatos scanned the far tree line and squinted his eyes into the dark at a pinprick of light. Was that a torch? His wings sprang out from his back at the same time that Macaria leaped up onto Mortis’s back with the practice of a master rider, despite her small stature and his great height. She shouldn’t have been able to with such a long dress, but she was talented and the dress was light, and she settled herself just behind the horse’s withers with her dress hiked up and showing off her beautiful, riding-toned creamy legs. Mortis had no bridle or saddle, but Macaria didn’t need them. She clicked her tongue and touched her sandaled heels lightly against his sides. She’d hardly used any pressure at all, but Mortis had understood and took off straight in the direction of the light. Realizing he’d been distracted ogling his wife’s legs, Thanatos launched himself into the air after Macaria and Mortis towards the faint, misty light ahead.

As they drew nearer, Thanatos was able to make out shapes in the darkness. The orange light at the head of the procession was indeed a torch carried by a figure dressed in saffron-colored robes, the color of magic, and a cloak a shade darker going into the purple spectrum. The misty aspect he had seen was due to the literally hundreds of ghostly specters following along behind her. The woman at the head of the procession only held one torch in her hand and he didn’t spy either a polecat or a black dog anywhere near her. There was no doubt about it, this was Melinoe, his sister-in-law and the second youngest of his king and queen’s children. Thanatos swooped down to meet her and Macaria pulled Mortis to a stop right before her older sister.

Thanatos set down and folded his wings against his back, and Macaria leaped off Mortis’s back screaming at the top of her lungs, “Meli!” before throwing herself into Melinoe’s arms.

The hood of Melinoe’s cloak was thrown back from the impact and the torch illuminated the white skin of her face. She was not white the way Macaria was white, but skeletal white like himself where she was white. She offered a little half smile for her sister and because her right hand was still holding the torch, she wrapped her black, literally ink black, left arm around Macaria’s back and said, “Hello to you too, Cari.”

Only with her sisters and parents did Macaria’s demeanor revert so completely back into that of an energetic child and accept being called by her old childhood nickname, Cari. It wasn’t that her serious face was a façade for this playful behavior or that she was putting on airs for her family by behaving like a kid. Both were her true face and she simply felt most comfortable being energetic and childlike with her family.

“You have quite a retinue of ghosts tonight, Melinoe,” Thanatos remarked once Macaria had released Melinoe from her hug.

Melinoe eyes blinked from Macaria to himself, giving him a brief glance of the heavy saffron-colored eye shadow on her lids and meeting his gaze with soul-piercing yellow eyes. They unnerved him every time and her magenta-colored lips twitched in amusement at his instinctive flinch. Despite Melinoe being the illegitimate daughter of Persephone by Zeus, she looked nothing like Zeus and only in the waves of her mixed black and white hair did she resemble her mother. Her features were eerie, literally half-black and half-white except for her eyes, as if the Fates (or whoever decided what children should look like) decided to emphasize her dual nature in her physical appearance, the blood of both the Heavens and the Underworld running through her veins serving as living reminder of the constant clash between Lord Zeus and Lord Hades… which was ironic because none of Lord Hades’ blood actually flowed through the woman’s veins. She was Lady Persephone’s daughter though, and that was enough for Lord Hades to love the child as his own. Watching how he’d cared for young Melinoe, nobody would ever guess he _hadn’t_ sired the girl and Lord Hades became her father in every way that mattered. She even wore a diadem exactly like Macaria’s to prove it to the world.

It didn’t need to be said, but everyone knew that if the positions had been reversed and Lord Hades had impregnated Lady Hera, Lord Zeus would have undoubtedly tried to cast him into Tartarus if not outright kill him and then would probably rip the child out of Lady Hera’s womb and kill her too. Melinoe was lucky to have Lord Hades for a father and it was honestly a miracle that he hadn’t killed Lord Zeus already.

Having had her brief fun with Thanatos, Melinoe glanced backward over her shoulder at the ghosts with a forlorn sigh. “There’s more of them than ever and it’s starting to get to the point where even _I_ won’t be able to keep them with me with my torch alone. Hecate has even more of them than I do,” she said. If Macaria’s voice relaxed the soul, then Melinoe’s chilled it to the core. She cast a meaningful glance at them. “This can’t continue. I know you two are doing your best, but what you’re doing right now isn’t working and something’s going to have to change if this system is going to be used for the next ten years.”

Macaria hung her head and nodded numbly. “I know, Meli.”

Seeing his darling wife so sad at her sister’s gentle reproach made Thanatos address Melinoe directly without much forethought. “I know it’s not much, but I’m not busy right now and I can take a bunch of these ghosts off your hands if that will help.”

Macaria brightened immediately at this suggestion. “Oh yes, and since they’ve already been reaped, I won’t accidentally send the souls to Elysium by touching them!” she exclaimed.

Melinoe’s reaction was more muted, but she looked just as pleased at the idea. “Absolutely, take as many as you can,” she offered with a wave of her hand.

The most time-consuming part of their job of soul reaping ironically wasn’t the actual reaping aspect, but just getting to the bodies of those who were about to die. Thanatos had his wings and Macaria rode on Mortis, who could also fly though he had no wings, and they were both fast means of transport, but traveling still ate time and they were still only two people. With so many souls gathered together in one place and free of their mortal bodies, all Thanatos and Macaria had to do was pass their hands right through them and the ghosts instantly became the filmy substance of soulstuff. In this way, they managed to collect at least half of the hundreds of ghosts Melinoe had accrued in her retinue and their knapsacks were bulging to near-breaking point.

Melinoe thanked them for their help and the two sisters hugged each other goodbye before Melinoe continued on her torchlit stroll with the rest of her spectral train. Since they were heading to the same destination, the Judicial Courtroom in Tartarus, Thanatos clambered onto Mortis’s back behind Macaria and held her waist as she directed Mortis to Tartarus. Thanatos wondered if the judges would be angry by the sheer volume of souls they were dumping on them to sort or if they would be pleased to have so much work to do. Melinoe was right, things couldn’t continue going on like this. He just didn’t know how to fix it.

()()()()()

“Thanatos?”

Thanatos looked up and looked over his shoulder at his wife. It had only been two years since the trial period for the new soul classification system had begun, but Macaria looked like she’d aged two centuries in that time. She was haggard and exhausted with bags under her eyes from lack of rest and Thanatos was sure he looked no better. He just felt worn out and wanted nothing more than to rest. He would not be surprised if Macaria felt the same.

“We have to talk to my parents. Now.”

Thanatos nodded mutely, finding no reason or will to resist. They hadn’t been able to come up with a solution for how to streamline their part in the death process. He climbed onto Mortis, who alone of the three of them still looked hardy and energetic, with Macaria and the pale white death horse carried them directly to the King and Queen of the Afterlife. It turned out they were both in the throne room in Tartarus and as soon as Mortis’s hooves touched ground, Lady Persephone let out an ungodly shriek.

“Macaria! Thanatos! What’s happened to you two?!”

Lady Persephone was upon them like mice in the grain and they were dragged off of Mortis’s back by the queen with surprising force. Once she had them on the ground, she had one hand on his shoulder, the other on Macaria’s and she was staring from one face to the other with stupefied horror. Lord Hades had rushed to her side and was staring at them with the same dumbfounded look as his wife. Thanatos wondered how long it had been since he and Macaria had last seen the royal pair. It was obvious to him that they had been clueless as to full scope of their plight.

The shock of their grim appearance quickly faded from Lord Hades’ countenance and his cold composure of judgement overcame him. Only the blazing light in his grayish-blue eyes let on how worried he was, but when he spoke, it was not as their father and father-in-law, but as the King of the Underworld. “Talk. _Now._ ”

Thanatos talked. He explained all the difficulties he and Macaria had been having trying to adjust to the new organization of the Underworld into the Afterlife. How Hermes was no longer able to act as a shepherd for souls. How the souls had to be judged before they even journeyed to the second dimension. How Macaria could only reap those souls who were destined for Elysium for risk of tainting other souls who had not earned the right to go there. How the human population had grown so much that he didn’t have time to reap souls and judge them at the same time. How the classification of souls had become so fine-tuned that his own judgements could no longer distinguish which soul residence the balanced souls should go to. How there was no way for the souls to get to the Afterlife without being led there and there _definitely_ wasn’t enough time for him to do that. How they had tried to find a way to solve the problem in the two years they’d been working exclusively with this new system, but hadn’t found a better way to manage the extra work and the more complicated soul classification the way it had been setup thus far.

“Macaria and I have been struggling with this problem trying to find a solution in what little spare time we’ve managed to get and we know it’s only going to get worse, but we just don’t know what to do. Can you please help us?” Thanatos finished desperately, not even caring how pitiful he sounded.

“You poor dears,” Lady Persephone cried and threw her arms around their necks, drawing them into tight, one-armed embraces. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

Thanatos didn’t have an answer, not one he liked anyway. Was it his pride that had prevented him from asking for help or his masculine ego that hadn’t wanted to admit he couldn’t handle the problem on his own?

Macaria answered her mother’s tearful entreaty. “Father managed to solve the problem of overpopulation in the Underworld by reconciling with Grandfather in order to expand the borders. How could I do less than Father for my own problems without trying everything I could think of first?”

His wife’s answer was very different from his own, but it sounded better and much less selfish. Was that a fundamental difference between men and women? Prideful ego versus fear of disappointing others? No, that wasn’t it. He’d known some pretty vain women who didn’t care about others if it got in the way of furthering their goals. Medea was a prime example of that.

Thanatos caught a glimpse of Lord Hades smile at his youngest and the king laid his hand on his short daughter’s head. “Macaria, not every problem _can_ be solved by oneself, not even by me. I knew the Underworld needed to be expanded, but I couldn’t have actually done it without relying on your mother’s and grandfather’s power to fuel my own without sucking me dry. I _might_ have been able to do it without them, but it was a lot easier with them there for support.”

Lady Persephone released her death grip on their necks and took a step back. Lord Hades slid his arm around her shoulders and his in-laws stared at them. “So, what _do_ we do?” Thanatos asked uncertainly.

Lord Hades frowned uncertainly, glanced down at Lady Persephone who shook her head, and looked back at him. “We don’t know,” he said. “You’ve brought up some very valid points that cannot be readily solved.”

“Perhaps _I_ may have an answer for you,” said a familiar voice from behind.

All four gods whirled in place and saw three women standing at the entrance to the throne room. From left to right, they were garbed in dresses of gray, brown, and yellow and ranged from oldest to youngest in that same order. It was the middle woman who had spoken. The two oldest Thanatos knew, but the youngest he didn’t recognize at all. He knew that the original Clotho had given up her power as Fate to become mortal and he’d met her replacement, but this wasn’t that same woman. Had Clotho’s power changed holders again? Already?

“Lachesis? _You_ know how to solve this problem?” Macaria asked hopefully.

The three Fates took Macaria’s inquiry as their cue to approach. Atropos and Lachesis walked with the assurance of familiarity, but this new Clotho had once been mortal and was still new enough to her immortality not to have lost her ingrained deference to the gods. None of the group bothered to question how the three women had known to come to the throne room. They were the Fates, what more needed to be said?

“I have a _possible_ solution in mind,” Lachesis stressed once they were finally within conversation range. “It seems to me that to lighten the burden of your work, you need a simple method to release large numbers of souls from their bodies and deliver them to their proper soul residence without your personal attention to every single mortal that dies. Does that about sum it up?”

“In essence,” Thanatos agreed slowly, but his curiosity was sparked. Did Lachesis really have an idea of how to make that all happen?

“First, an introduction. This is our new Clotho,” Lachesis said, gesturing to the tall, weedy young girl on her left.

Clotho smiled shyly from behind her dark curly locks and waved at them. Macaria waved back with an encouraging smile of her own.

Lachesis went on. “Our sister gave up her power and immortality as a goddess and transferred it all to this young woman’s predecessor and now the power has transferred again. We have also seen the evidence of Gaea’s own powers of nature be transferred to you, Persephone, right before she became mortal and died-”

“WHAT?!” The exclamation erupted from everyone.

“Gaea’s dead! Since when?!” Lord Hades demanded.

“What do you mean she transferred her power to me?!” Lady Persephone shouted in alarm.

For some reason, the three Fates looked taken aback by this outburst. “You mean you all still haven’t noticed?” Atropos asked.

“ _NO!_ ” they all shrieked in unison.

“Oh…” Lachesis said meekly. “Well, Gaea died a little less than two centuries ago not long after Cronus’s release from imprisonment, though the two events aren’t connected in any way. Before she died, she condensed the essence of all her power and transferred it to Persephone. We think she chose you because she felt you of all her earthly descendants were most worthy of her power. You have all the powers of nature at your disposal, surpassing that of even your mother and grandmother. You mean you never noticed before now?”

“No! I mean… not _consciously!_ ” Lady Persephone protested. “I guess I noticed a while back that I seemed more in tune with the land and the elements of nature than I had before, but I just thought it was my power growing with my age. I didn’t know it was _Gaea’s_ power I was tapping into!”

“Ah, well, now you know. You have Gaea’s power and are, in essence, the new Green Mother,” Lachesis said quickly.

“Some Mother…” Lady Persephone muttered in amazement and she stood lost in thought as she considered the implications this would mean for her now that she _knew_ she had full control over the fundamental principles of Nature itself.

Atropos took over for Lachesis, who was still struggling to regain her composure. “Gaea transferred the power and her immortality along with it so that she could become fully mortal and… we say she died because we can no longer communicate with her, but her spirit never left the earth and it would be more accurate to say she merely went to sleep and her mind faded away into obscurity.”

In the time it took for Atropos to explain this and for them to absorb this startling news, Lachesis seemed to have regained her original thread and spoke up again. “The powers of Clotho – we’ve been calling it the Office – have transferred twice, Gaea’s power has transferred, and Hades, when you expanded the borders of the Underworld and assigned the direct management of Elysium, Asphodel, and Tartarus to separate entities, you ended up unwittingly creating two new offices of power that will inevitably change the very nature of the Afterlife. They are the Office of Good, assigned to Cronus who rules Elysium, and the Office of Evil, bestowed upon yourself as the sole ruler of Tartarus.”

Lord Hades, who still hadn’t fully gotten over his shock at hearing of Gaea’s death, looked absolutely livid at this news. “ _What_ ,” he bit out.

Rightly guessing what he was thinking, Lachesis quickly said, “It doesn’t mean you _are_ evil or that Cronus is good, just that you’re responsible for the mortals that are evil and Cronus for those that are good.”

Excellent save on her part. Lord Hades still didn’t look happy, but he was mollified enough not to cast her into the depths of Tartarus with impunity. He was feared enough as it was just for being the God of the Dead and an outcast from Olympus in all but name. He didn’t need to be vilified as an evil man on top of everything else, especially not if Lord Cronus would be glorified at his expense. It was one thing for Lord Zeus to be worshipped without reserve and quite another for his father to be gifted with that same religious fervor.

“It’s because of your actions, Hades, that I think the plan I’ve devised will work. Before you, the transfer of power had been on a one-to-one basis, but what you did was create two separate Offices from your own power and give them to two different people. You may have ended up giving the rulership of Tartarus to yourself and think that what I say is invalid, but if you had instead named Macaria as the Queen of Tartarus, then the Office would have been given to her just as easily,” Lachesis explained.

“So, you’re saying we need to create one of these… Offices of our power and give them to someone else?” Thanatos asked uncertainly. “How would that help? Transferring our one powers to one person each wouldn’t change anything and splitting our powers among multiple people may help in the short term, but if one person is left doing all the reaping, he’ll be exhausted and nobody will be able to help him because he’s the only one who can do that job.”

Lachesis smiled and bit her lip in excitement. “You’re right, Thanatos. A one-to-one transfer and splitting your powers is no good. Death is too important a service to humanity to split up between a multitude of mortals anyway. No, what I recommend is something completely different: instead of splitting your powers, combine them. Join together the powers of the Blessed Death, the Nonviolent Death, and the Violent Death into one _single_ entity as the Office of Death.”

The middle aspect of Fate seemed quite pleased with her pronouncement, but Thanatos didn’t see the appeal. “Maybe I just don’t get it, but how does combining _all_ of the powers of death into one help solve anything? Macaria and I can barely get done the work that we _do_ have, and you want us to foist our troubles off onto a single poor sap that also has to deal with the violent deaths my hundreds of Keres sisters already happily take care of without issue?”

Somehow, Atropos seemed even more gleeful than Lachesis for his asking that question and it made her look much more youthful than her physical age suggested. She was enjoying this just as much as her younger sister. “Because, my dear Thanatos, if all of the powers of death are combined together into one man or woman, then that office holder will have a new power that neither you, Macaria, nor the Keres have ever possessed: the absolute will of Death. If there is one figure responsible for the departure of all souls from the body, he can give his tacit approval for all souls to die once I cut my threads, an automatic reaping without your personal attention to every single mortal thread I cut. And if it’s by Death’s will that bodies are allowed to die and give up their souls, then it’s also by Death’s will that they should ascend or descend to the proper soul residence according to the cumulative balance of good and evil on their souls, an instant judgement and delivery of souls, again, without your personal attention. With the majority of human souls taken care of in this way, only the balanced souls neither light enough to float nor heavy enough to sink will need Death’s personal attention to extract, judge, and deliver.”

“And as for reading the balances of souls on a more finely-tuned level, we can get you the same tools the judges use to read souls and create a simple means of sending souls to their proper residence without interrupting your workflow,” Lachesis added in a conspiratorial whisper.

Thanatos could hardly believe his ears. This sounded so incredible it was almost too good to be true. The Fates must have been thinking on this for a while to have presented it like this!

“If there is only one Death entity, then what will happen to the others?” Macaria asked.

The three Fates looked away sadly and just like that, Thanatos’s elation died. This was a possible solution, as Lachesis had said, but not one without sacrifices.

“It depends on who is presented with the power of the Office of Death,” Clotho piped up shyly. “But whoever receives it, whether it’s one of you or someone else, all the powers and immortality of the various deaths will be gathered together into this one Office. Those who do not have it will become mortal and they will eventually die, as is the fate of all mortals.”

“No, I won’t allow it,” Lord Hades growled so viciously that Clotho immediately shrank back in fear.

“Hades, it’s only a possible option we’ve come up with. We never claimed it was the only option or even the _best_ option, it’s just the only one we’ve come up with,” Lachesis said placatingly.

Thanatos wondered about that. The Fates had neatly come up with a solution that could handle all of the problems they were now facing. They all might be able to come up with an alternative plan, but what if there wasn’t one? They were gods, but the world was no longer young enough to tamper with its fundamental workings without consequence. Gaea had given up her power and died on her own terms shortly after. Clotho had given up her own power to pursue a life of her own choosing and its cost was mortality. Lord Hades had expanded the Underworld across the entirety of the second dimension to solve the problem of overpopulation, and his price for doing so was significantly decreased authority over two of the soul residences he’d once governed absolutely. If they wanted to change the very nature of the business of death, perhaps losing their godhood was the only way to do that.

Thanatos looked over at Macaria and found her staring right back at him. Concern marred her pale features, but her grayish-blue eyes were lit with determination and in that instant, he knew they were of the same mind. There _was_ no alternative.

“What would happen to the Keres if their powers were absorbed into this Office of Death?” he asked the Fates.

They were called goddesses, but they were more like personified spirits as evidenced by their numbers being hundreds and individual personalities being… distinctly lacking. He asked only out of propriety rather than out of personal care for what would happen to them. They were his sisters, _technically_ … similar to how Lady Persephone was _technically_ both Macaria’s mother and cousin. Obviously, one won out in favor over the other.

Lachesis looked thoughtful as she tilted her head back and pondered while gazing upward at the ceiling. “You know, I’m not sure. They’re not _really_ goddesses in the true sense of the word and without their power or immortality, I imagine they would just revert back into ether and cease to exist unless someone willed them into being.”

“Oh? Beings can be created out of the ether?” Lord Hades asked with one eyebrow raised, looking mildly interested.

“I should think so, though the real trick would be getting them to leave once you’re done with them if you didn’t want them to hang around for eternity,” she said. “What is brought into existence cannot be so readily gotten rid of, especially not if it has a mind and will of its own.”

While Lachesis was talking, Thanatos had glanced back at Macaria again. She took his hand in hers and squeezed. He nodded. “Moirai, Lord Hades, Lady Persephone, Macaria and I would like some time to think over what has been suggested here. Let’s reconvene a week from now,” he offered to those present.

The Moirai bowed their heads in acceptance and left the throne room. Lady Persephone had started wringing her hands anxiously, but stopped when her husband wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against his side. That didn’t stop Lord Hades from giving them his own concerned frown before he dismissed them with a silent nod. The death couple took their leave, mounted Mortis once more, and the Deathsteed took off for their small home. They wouldn’t be allowed to spend too much time there – Thanatos could already sense they were getting backlogged – but they needed a breather first to organize their thoughts and confer with each other in more than just silent touches, glances, and nods.

They reached the house in hardly any time at all thanks to Mortis’s fast pace and they dismounted, leaving the horse to trot out to any green pasture of his choosing while they stepped into their shared house.

Once they were inside and the door was closed, Macaria asked, “You agree, don’t you? That combining our powers into one Office and giving our immortality to someone else is the only way?”

Thanatos nodded. “Yes, I am sure this is the way it must be. It feels right to me, but waiting a week under the pretext of ‘making a decision’ gives your parents some time to get adjusted to the idea of us becoming mortal, especially you. You saw how dead set against it the both of them were.”

“Yes… it’s awful when your parents die, but you expect them to die before you. Parents shouldn’t have to bury their grown-up children, especially not if those children are gods,” Macaria said with mournful sadness.

Thanatos caught her shoulders and pulled her forward into his arms, holding her in a gentle embrace for as long as he dared before they had to return to their work in the mortal realm.

()()()()()

As decreed, a week after the initial meeting, the three parties met up once more in the throne room, and Thanatos and Macaria declared their desire to carry out the Fates’ plan and create one single Office of Death to give to a mortal person in their stead. The Moirai accepted this with grace, perhaps having already expected this outcome or laid it out themselves. Lord Hades and Lady Persephone were not happy to hear this, but they did not protest this time. As Thanatos had guessed, they had needed the week to come to terms with losing their youngest daughter, knowing, as Thanatos had known, that there was no other way to resolve this situation.

“When?” Lady Persephone asked in a choked voice that made Thanatos’s heart lurch with guilt.

“As soon as we can find someone to replace us,” Macaria answered her mother.

They all turned to the Moirai simultaneously. Lachesis spoke, “We’ve been looking, but we haven’t yet found anyone with a suitable temperament for the job. This person will be responsible for _all_ deaths, even the violent ones, and finding someone with a hardy disposition who’s also sympathetic to those in literal mortal suffering is not an easy feat. We will let you know when we have found someone that might qualify for the Office so that you can meet them and see how they might fare.”

There was nothing more to be done. Only the Fates could know how long their searching would take, and in this case, even _they_ didn’t know. A month passed with Thanatos and Macaria still struggling to keep up with all the deaths and souls when Hermes appeared before the pair of them, surprisingly together for once, and handed them a letter. There was no signature at the bottom indicating who had sent it and there were only three words on the entire page: _We found one._

They knew exactly what that meant and they promptly arrived in the throne room on Mortis where the Moirai and Macaria’s parents were waiting for them. Who they did _not_ expect to see standing there were Hecate, who had been like an aunt to Macaria growing up, Thanatos’s parents: Nyx and the insubstantial cloud of darkness that was Erebus next to her, and his twin brother, Hypnos, from his side of the family, and from hers, all her sisters, the three Furies: Tisiphone, Megaera, and Alecto, and Melinoe. Even Cerberus had been temporarily released from his guard duty at the front gates of Tartarus proper to say goodbye to the youngest child of his masters. Thanatos felt himself become overwhelmed with emotion and Macaria had clapped her hands over her mouth, tears already streaming down her face in response to this heartwarming reception.

Unable to hold herself back anymore, Macaria dashed forward and seven pairs of arms reached out to her, pulling her in, and ensnaring her in their loving warmth. Lord Hades and the Erinyes as a rule, very rarely cried, but tears flowed uninhibited down these strong, stoic faces. The last time anyone could remember these four shedding tears had been when their adopted son and brother, Adonis, had been killed by a boar. It was as though this tearful reunion was their final farewell parting and not merely a transition to mortal life. In a way, perhaps it was a type of death and mortal time passed so quickly for immortals that if they weren’t paying attention, Macaria and himself would be dead and gone without their realizing it.

Thanatos had never been one of big, open displays of emotion, but the tender sight of his wife enveloped by her birth family so moved him that he approached his own and, for the first time ever, hugged his younger twin. Hypnos’s white wings startled open and floundered about in helpless shock at this completely unexpected action on his part – there had been hugs between them when they were little, but Hypnos had always been the one to initiate them – but they eventually settled down. He felt his brother’s thin arms tentatively hold his torso and when Thanatos didn’t reject him, Hypnos grew bolder and wrapped them so tightly around his chest, he might have been trying to squeeze the life out of him. Thanatos felt wetness on his shoulder and realized with a start that Hypnos was crying. This unreserved proof of affection, more than anything else, broke him and now Thanatos too was crying. He felt his mother’s gentle touch and his father’s own misty, sensory-deprived embrace, and he absorbed their love deep into his heart, feeling like a child in need of comfort for the first time in thousands of millennia.

Once the tears had subsided and his shoulders stopped shaking, Thanatos released his brother and stepped back from his most-important family members, memorizing their features for what might very well be the last time he saw them. He looked over at his wife, and she was giving her goodbye kisses to all three of Cerberus’s noses, the monstrous snake-maned, snake tailed beast whining mournfully at her. With that task complete, Macaria returned to his side and entwined her fingers with his. As one, they looked to the three waiting Moirai, who had respectfully held themselves aloof while they said their goodbyes.

Now, Lachesis stepped forward and held up a red string between her hands. “This is the one we found. His name is Musaeus, he’s twenty-three years old and he’s already lived quite a hard life despite his age. His father died when he was young, so he was forced to neglect his education in favor of work to help his mother take care of his siblings. He’s already had to steal food and money to make ends meet when it suited him and even killed once to save a sister from being raped, but he’s also given food and money to other neighboring families in dire straits if they had a little extra. He seems pretty rough around the edges and his family’s poverty has given him a disillusioned view of the world, but he has a good heart that means well underneath all that gruffness.”

Thanatos and Macaria studied the thread with the same intensity of focus they used when reading a soul. “His soul’s in balance right now. He has a lot of sin on his soul, but only because his situation demands it and he’s a good person in spite of it,” Macaria commented.

“Yes, we noticed that too,” Clotho said quickly. “Early on in our search, we noted that none of the purely good souls had sufficient exposure to the misery of the world to be able to withstand the pressure of the Office and those souls with copious amounts of evil understood that misery, but often lacked the sympathy required to be merciful to those who were suffering. The balanced souls seemed to have both for the most part.”

“That makes sense,” Thanatos agreed. “Well, he seems like a decent fellow all things considered. We shall go meet him and see what we think. If we like him, we’ll give him the Office and if we don’t, we’ll simply come back here to the throne room.”

“Meet us in our Abode instead,” Lachesis suggested. “That way you can give us your impression of what you found unsuitable and we can begin to search immediately for a new candidate with your recommendations in mind.”

“Sounds excellent, we’ll do that,” he said.

“Keep in mind you two,” Atropos began warningly. “We think he’s a good candidate for the Office, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll take you up on the offer. Death is a grim business that mortals would rather avoid, as you well know. If you really want him and he’s resisting you, tell me through this earring…” she tossed him a gold earring with a round, polished ruby. “and I’ll cut his thread for you to make him more submissive. Remember, when I cut the thread, he won’t actually die until you reap his soul. He’ll just lose the will to continue living long enough for you to give him the Office and then Lachesis can repair it to extend his line as if nothing happened.”

“Well, hopefully it won’t come to all that,” Thanatos said uncertainly and stuck the earring in his cloak pocket. Why Atropos had given him an earring instead of a regular ring when he didn’t have pierced ears, he had no idea.

Thanatos did not hitch a ride on Mortis this time, but instead scooped Macaria up into his arms and flew them both out of Tartarus to Musaeus’ home. They both agreed that as a Death horse, Mortis would be the ideal means of transport to carry the new Death to his clients and that the horse may not understand this transfer of godhood and ownership to a mortal man he didn’t know, especially not if it was happening right in front of him. They really had no idea how this would go down, but they hoped it would go as smoothly as the Moirai had implied it should.

They reached the house Musaeus lived in with his family, but found he wasn’t home. His mother, not perceiving their true natures, told them he was out in the fields working as a laborer during harvest in the hopes of earning extra grain to store during the winter months. The death couple thanked her for the information and set out in the direction of the closest fields, an easy enough feat for a god with wings. They found him quick enough and Thanatos landed once more. He set Macaria down and they silently watched Musaeus as he worked. He was rough-looking, heavyset man with dark skin from long hours in the sun and a poorly-trimmed beard to match his short, frizzy hair matted with sweat and dirt. His bulging arm muscles bespoke of his years of hard labor and his expertise was demonstrated in the skill he used with the sickle to chop down the barley stalks.

At a glance, he looked nothing short of a brutish tramp, but the pair observed a rather well-dressed boy of about ten carrying a large bucket of water with a ladle over to him. Musaeus’ eyes wrinkled and his beard twitched into a kind smile as he accepted the ladle from the lad and gulped down two spoonfuls of water.

Musaeus wiped the extra water away from his mouth with the back of his hand and gave the ladle back to the boy, saying in a gruff voice, “Thank you, Toma, but don’t forget to drink some for yourself out here. It’s good of you to help your father take care of the workers, but you need to take care of yourself too.”

The boy, Toma, grinned brightly up at him. “See, that’s why you’re my favorite worker here, Musaeus! Even though you look scary and you’re only doing all this hard work to help feed your folks, you still care about snot-nosed brats like me.”

Musaeus raised an amused eyebrow at him. “There ever comes a day I see you wiping snot on your nice shirt sleeves, I’ll wonder what nature sprite decided to replace you. Now get goin’ kid. Time waits for no man and there are a bunch of other thirsty fellas out here.”

The reprimand was only half-hearted at best, but Toma departed immediately for the next field hand with a merry whistle and a spring in his step, not splashing a single drop of his precious cargo.

“I like him,” Macaria said immediately after Toma had gone. “I _really_ like him.”

“So do I. His circumstance is bad, but his soul is good. There’s a problem though,” Thanatos said gravely.

“Ah, so you noticed it too then.”

He nodded. “He’s too attached to life. Even if we made ourselves noticeable to him right now, he won’t take the Office without drastic measures.”

“Do you think he’s worth resorting to those measures?”

Thanatos considered. He considered the man’s soul, now plainly visible to him, and the scene he’d just witnessed. “I do.”

“Then we need Atropos’s assistance. You have the earring, beloved,” Macaria reminded him.

Thanatos withdrew the bit of jewelry from his pocket and, somewhat awkwardly, spoke into the ruby. “Atropos, he’s the one we want. Do what you have to.”

 _“Understood,”_ Atropos’s voice echoed back through from the earring to his surprise, but he pocketed it and he moved forward with Macaria to approach the man who would become the new Death.

Their hands had entwined each other’s again and they could each feel the other’s specific death powers tingling just under the skin. It was being drawn forth, circulating, and mingling with the other’s, and seemed to be comfortable coalescing about Thanatos’s black death cloak while it waited to be transferred to the new Death.

“Musaeus,” Thanatos called to the man once they were standing only three feet away.

The man looked up at being called and Thanatos was startled to see the dark eyes that had twinkled so brightly at Toma’s presence mere seconds ago were suddenly so dead and lifeless. He abruptly realized that this was Atropos’s handiwork. She had cut his thread and he’d lost the will to live, but wasn’t dead.

“Musaeus, I am Thanatos, and I’ve come here to…” he began, but stopped because a wild, animalistic gleam had entered into those dark eyes. There was a fierce desperateness there that gave Musaeus the unflattering impression of a madman drunk on Dionysus’s wine.

“Never…” Musaeus snarled like a cornered beast with a deranged expression. “Never, never, never, you won’t take me like you took my father to leave my poor wretched mother and siblings behind on this hell you call Earth.”

Macaria, alarmed, made to step forward and correct his erroneous assumption. The sickle twitched. The only warning. He lunged, so fast Thanatos barely saw him move, and a fountain of blood gushed out of Macaria’s neck. Macaria, eyes wide in shock and disbelief, keeled over backwards. Dead. Thanatos only had a moment to stare in horror at his wife’s petrified face before he felt a thin, sharp slice at his own neck. It was barely anything at all, except that red blood spurted out rapidly. He couldn’t breathe. He was choking on his own blood and losing consciousness, unable to understand what had happened. He collapsed to his knees and toppled sideways, knowing no more. Death was now dead.

Thanatos was in no position to be able to recount what happened next, but even if he wasn’t, he couldn’t have told you how this tragedy had occurred. Gods cannot be killed by mere _sickles_ after all, especially not by manmade ones without any magical properties. Indeed, on a normal day, Thanatos and Macaria could not have been killed by such an attack, but today was _not_ a normal day. They had released their power in preparation to transfer it to their chosen Death candidate and it had coalesced on Thanatos’s cloak, inadvertently leaving them as vulnerable as any mortal.

When first Macaria and then Thanatos died, their death powers were still present in the cloak and with its holders dead, the magic suffused itself into the material, but their immortality could not manifest in an inanimate object, so it reached out and latched onto the one who had stolen their lives from them. He was no more invulnerable to attack than Thanatos and Macaria had been to his sickle, for now the death cloak was imbued with that particular power, but he would never age as long as he wasn’t killed. This was how Musaeus ended up becoming the first mortal Death.

Musaeus stared in wide-eyed shock down at the two dead people before him, horrified by what he’d done. His hands shook so badly that the sickle fell out of his hands and fell point first into the ground, sticking up ominously. The very instant he’d perceived them, he’d recognized him and only those on the brink of death can see Death. Thanatos and Macaria both had come for his soul. Just a moment ago, he had inexplicably lost his will to live and had barely begun to contemplate slitting his own throat with the sickle in his hands when the Death couple had appeared before him. Nothing quite frightens a man to cling to life like the visage of Death. That fearsome, frightening instinct took hold with a vengeance and like a cornered animal, Musaeus had lashed out with everything he had, beyond all reason.

Only once the threat disappeared and his sense returned in the aftermath did he realize the full weight of what he had done. He had killed. Killed two gods. And they were Death gods. There would be hell to pay for this and he was distantly amazed that Hades hadn’t already split the ground where he stood to have the earth swallow him whole.

It was around this time that he noticed a big brown female spider descending on a line of silken thread. He watched her progress, somewhat mesmerized, and then belatedly realized there weren’t any trees or buildings hovering over him for her line to have attached to. She was quite literally descending from the sky itself and no mortal spider, not even the original Arachne herself, could perform such a feat. Once his mind had made the next logical leap, the spider began to grow and transform until a middle-aged brown-haired woman stood in her place. She was a bit dowdy, but there was still something divinely sublime about her aspect. Just like Thanatos and Macaria, he had never before lain eyes on the woman, but he instantly knew who she was, and her presence horrified him as much as that of the Gods of Death, only made worse by the two corpses of her former coworkers lying between them. It was Lachesis, one of the Fates.

The goddess’s eyes sighted on the bodies and an anguished moan escaped her parted lips. Musaeus, for his part, seemed to have stopped breathing and couldn’t move, no matter how much he willed his legs to do so. They would not budge. He was frozen stiff with terror for his fate. He couldn’t even appreciate the irony of his own mental wordplay, so great was his fear. After the goddess had finished her quiet contemplation of her cohorts, she looked up, directly at him, and her grim frown became grimmer still. A shiver ran down his spine.

“Musaeus,” she said imperiously without a hint of any emotional turmoil whatsoever. “You have killed Thanatos and his wife. To atone for this sin, you must now become the new Thanatos and carry out the duties of the Office of Death.”

()()()()()

While Lachesis spoke to the new Death, the residents of Tartarus were in just as much shock at the sudden, brutal murder of Thanatos and Macaria as Musaeus himself was. There were horrified and at a loss. Two female spiders, one gray and the other yellow, appeared in throne room and quickly transformed into aged Atropos and young Clotho who was supporting the elderly goddess’s weight by one of her arms slung across her shoulders. She had been a strong, working girl as a mortal and that had not changed now that she was immortal. Silent Melinoe noticed them first and tugged on her mother’s sleeve to get her attention. Persephone noticed what her daughter did and pounced on them with all the savage fury of the distraught.

“Atropos! You said you would help them with the process! This was supposed to be a peaceful transfer of power, so why are my daughter and son-in-law now _dead_ and _murdered_ by their own successor?!” Persephone all but screamed at the old goddess. Macaria and Thanatos had not been ten minutes dead yet, but there is very little of your life that does not escape the Queen of the Dead’s notice when she is your mother by blood or by marriage, especially when she is paying attention.

The eldest Moira, old in appearance and in years, bowed her head further under the weight of this rebuttal and her body seemed to be shake with heavy emotion. Clotho’s eyes were all for the elder, staying silent, watchful, and worried.

“My lady… my lord, I’m sorry…” Atropos finally gasped aloud. “It’s my fault… all my fault… The wrong I’ve done you can never be forgiven…” When she allowed her gray eyes to gaze upon the royal family, a never-ending stream of tears were already cascading down her wrinkled, sagging cheeks. “My carelessness doomed them. I wasn’t paying proper attention to the threads and when I tried to cut Musaeus’, to end his self-preservation instinct, I snipped only a part of it. That was my first error and I compounded it further by trying to fix the mistake. In doing so, I… I missed Musaeus’ and cut Thanatos’s and Macaria’s too short, well before their time. I shouldn’t have been able to do so, but they… had already given up their immortality in order to give it to Musaeus and there was nothing they could do… I killed them… They entrusted us with their safekeeping and I betrayed them and you in the worst way possible…”

Atropos first lowered her eyes, unable to bear looking into the grief-stricken mother’s eyes, and then she lowered her body from Clotho’s support. She got down on her knees and lay over them with her arms extended outward in open supplication. “Please dread Queen Persephone and my Lord Hades… please punish me in a manner that befits a traitor and a murderer.”

Persephone had been queen for many millennia and had long since learned the art of judging souls and assigning befitting punishments for the most heinous of crimes. It was often her name that was invoked when the mortals called for curses to be delivered upon those who had wronged them and just as often, it was the Furies who enacted their mother’s will. However, the dark-eyed woman gazing down at Atropos was not the Queen of the Afterlife, nor the Goddess of Spring Growth, former minor Goddess of Flowers, or current incarnation of Nature. Only a bereaved mother stood before the eldest of the Moirai and she fell to her knees before Atropos. She laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder and brought her into her embrace.

“It’s not your fault. It was an accident; you meant them no ill will, and you _were_ trying to help them. We are gods, but even you are not infallible, dear one. You are forgiven,” Persephone said softly, consoling instead of berating the goddess who was her half-sister, though their relationship had never been that of siblings. Only the hitch in her voice and the tears flowing down her face betrayed her inner turmoil. Atropos sobbed harder and clung desperately to the queen.

“Atropos _is_ forgiven, but _Musaeus_ is _not_!” a harsh voice declared sharply.

Persephone pulled away from Atropos and glanced backward over her shoulder with a grim frown at where the rest of her family had remained. The harshness could have belonged to Hades, but the pitch was too high to have come from her husband. If she had not been already intimately familiar with the voice, she would only have had to make note of the focus of everyone’s gaze to know who had spoken. As it was, all eyes, even hers, were fixed on Tisiphone, the eldest of the triplet Furies and her first-born child.

The Erinyes were beautiful, noble-looking women of the Underworld even without the bias of Persephone’s motherhood coloring her vision, though their beauty could not be compared to that of the Olympian goddesses. It wasn’t that the Olympians were _more_ beautiful, simply that the standards of the Underworld and Olympus for feminine beauty were not the same. Indeed, by Olympian standards, her three eldest daughters were considered ugly with their writhing snake hair, black feathered wings, and blood-red eyes. Even as infants, her own mother had instinctively recoiled at the first sight of them. This initial reaction had not hindered Demeter from forming a bond with her granddaughters and becoming fond of them, but it had not endeared her to Hades, who was instantly smitten by his newborn baby girls and only noticed their so-called ‘deformities’ to the extent of finding their tiny, wiggly noodle snakes that were their hair to be absolutely adorable.

Tisiphone, Megaera, and Alecto were called the Erinyes – the Furies – and they were triplets, but they were not identical to each other at all. The only other feature they shared was their preference for long black robes with a splash of red, some gold jewelry to wear, and gold metal diadems exactly like Melinoe’s and Macaria’s except that they had a ruby in place of a diamond and Tisiphone, as the oldest had an extra, smaller ruby dangling from the coronet on both sides of the larger one. Megaera’s skin tone was the darker shade that matched hers while Tisiphone and Alecto were paler, but not nearly as much as their father. Megaera’s snake hair was also black like Hades’, but her snakes hung in tightly-curled waves and probably would have looked exactly like Persephone’s in style if her hair was normal and the queen had let her hair down from her tight bun. By contrast, Alecto’s snake hair was the lightest and straightest, the color of Persephone’s own medium brown only after it had been sun-bleached to a lighter hue. In both color and style, Tisiphone’s own snake hair was right between that of her two younger sisters, medium brown and slightly wavy.

All eyes in the room were fixed on Tisiphone after her resounding declaration. Her lids were half-lowered revealing the black eye shadow she wore and making her red-eyed gaze all the more threatening. Her teeth were bared in a silent snarl, her hands were clenched into tight fists, and her snakes quivered with rage. Next to her, Megaera’s and Alecto’s snakes also writhed about, sharing in their sister’s fury. These three women were not the Goddesses of Vengeance for nothing.

“Atropos may have mis-cut the threads, but _she_ is not the one who actually releases the souls from the body,” Tisiphone continued relentlessly. “She schedules the termination, not the enforcement. She did not conspire to _murder_ our sister and brother-in-law; it is _Musaeus_ who’s to blame and it is his sin alone! We cannot, _will not_ , let the slayer of our kin go unpunished and he is not immune from our wrath!”

As though they were one being, the three Furies lifted one arm each and overlapped their hands together, drawing strength from each other and uniting their powers. The waiting audience watched this with some trepidation. A malevolent ball of black light began to glow faintly around their hands and became bigger, stronger, and darker with every passing second. This was raw curse magic requiring absolute strength of will and intense focus. In its unrefined state, curse magic was as volatile and uncontrollable as chaos, but defining the curse and naming its receiver effectively made it a weapon of deadly potency for the one named, and a defanged viper for everyone else. Each of the individual Erinyes could create curses on her own and only joined their powers together for especially powerful curses.

Once the massive black sphere of light finally seemed to stop growing, Tisiphone called out, “By the powers invested in me, and of we furious sisters three, our kin by blood and law has been cruelly slain and we Furies demand life for life in the same vein. We name the new Incarnation of Death to be the bearer of this onus, that wicked usurper of the name Thanatos. We curse you, curse you, curse you now, oh hateful Musaeus! As you murdered Death and stole the robe and scythe, so you too shall encounter your successor and face a violent end to your immortal life!”

The curse flashed once darkly, named and defined, and consumed the three goddesses in its ambience as it spread and enveloped them, then suddenly vanished. The curse of the Erinyes had been cast. For the violent loss of Macaria and Thanatos, they had cursed the very Office of Death itself to pass from predecessor to successor by means of murder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I won't lie. I was REALLY looking forward to doing this chapter AND had the inspiration for it, hence why it got done so quickly. It was a lot of fun to try and reconcile the Thanatos of Greek mythology with the Thanatos of Incarnations of Immortality. Zane's Mortis says there have been other Deathsteeds before him, but I decided this one would be the original Death horse. I went slightly off-tangent when discussing Macaria's family because I haven't yet had the opportunity to discuss them in my writing yet, so I hope it wasn't too overboard.
> 
> I'm pretty sure Macaria is only briefly mentioned in one instance, so she's not a prominent figure and is not, canonically-speaking, Thanatos's wife, but he doesn't have one, so I decided she would be his wife. With them both being Death gods, it's only fitting. Those familiar with Incarnations of Immortality may have picked up on this, but something I tried to imply about the Keres losing their immortality and becoming ether is that they are the origin of the first demons of Hell (possibly the angels too, but I was more focused on the demons).
> 
> You may also noticed that Thanatos doesn't seem to have all of the accoutrements that Zane has by the time he inherits the Office of Death. That's intentional because Thanatos has no need for them and there's still plenty of time between Antiquity and the 20th century for the rest of the accessories to accumulate.


	6. Fate (Atropos)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is surprisingly short for my normal chapter lengths, but it's over 1000 words, so it's well within my minimum standard. This takes place right after the previous chapter with little to no interlude. Finally halfway-done, chapter-wise.

The violent transition from the fully-divine Death gods to the new semi-immortal Incarnation of Death had thrown everything into chaos for several months. Unlike with the Moirai’s past two transitions with Clotho, the double murder of Macaria and Thanatos had deprived the current Death of the ability to consult with those of prior experience for advice in implementing his new role. He couldn’t even rely on what he had learned of the death process in his mortal life because it, and the very nature of the Afterlife was so different, it was unknown. The new Thanatos realized to his despair that he was creating the new process at the same time that he was attempting to learn it. The release of good and evil souls when they died was made much simpler and he only had to attend to the deaths of the balanced clients, thank Zeus, but he had enough difficulties with those both physically and morally. He was constantly busy, often late, and felt dreadfully overworked, barely having a chance to get his bearings and breathe, but time stopped for no one and people never stopped dying as a result. When he _did_ have moments to himself, brief as they were, he contemplated on the nature of his duty, his purpose, and his very existence.

All these little nuances piled together and seemed to exacerbate the grave enormity of his new life and it wasn’t until the man known as Musaeus had been Thanatos for a year that he _finally_ appeared to settle into the rhythm of his Office. He’d even grown bold enough to try and strike up a _very_ friendly relationship with Clotho, and she having been in her Office barely longer than a year herself, was receptive to his advances and finally discarded the last vestige of her mortal inhibitions through a passionate indulgence. They both understood and shared the same sense of inferiority they felt in the presence of their divine colleagues due to their being mortals turned immortal and acting like gods.

While Thanatos was undergoing this year-long period of rapid self-growth, a drastic change had overcome Atropos, the eldest of the three Fates, from the moment Musaeus assumed the Office of Death. She had always been a serene, joyful woman of even temper. Now though, she was full of the somber melancholy of mourning, grave and reclusive, even in the isolated company of Lachesis and Clotho. Clotho had not known Atropos long, so had thought the change in behavior odd, but not noteworthy. However, Lachesis had lived with her sister all her life and was worried for her. She’d had her tiffs with the original Clotho, her younger sister, but never Atropos. Atropos was the eldest and therefore automatically respected. Lachesis had never seen her so unusually downcast for so long, and she was terrified about what it might mean. Memories of her little sister, long since dead and gone, floated ominously through her mind, but she always managed to shake such thoughts away. Surely not… surely she was only being paranoid… It was impossible to think that the last permanent fixture of her life might choose to go the same route as Clotho.

If Lachesis had been aware of how near the mark her fears had struck, she’d have clung to Atropos with all the ferocity of a lioness upon her prey and would never have let her go again.

Atropos hadn’t been the same since Musaeus had assumed the Office of Death. This was technically true, but it would be more accurate to say she hadn’t been the same since she’d accidentally cut short Thanatos and Macaria’s life threads. Goddess though she was, she had never once claimed to be infallible. She made mistakes sometimes, rare and minor as they usually were. She’d made worse ones much more often in her youth when she and her younger sisters were just getting started with their life’s work, and tragedy had befallen many mortals as a result, but she had never felt the impact except in the tangles and knots that appeared in the Tapestry of Life. Perhaps it was punishment for her previous callousness born out of ignorance, but this otherwise simple mis-cutting struck her with profound awareness and grief as a result of her actions. Nothing, not even Clotho’s departure and death, had affected her so deeply. But Clotho had died an overripe old grandmother surrounded by her children and grandchildren, her own husband dead six years previous. This was not at all the case for Thanatos and Macaria. Persephone had forgiven her, but Atropos had not forgiven herself. Her careless error had cost Thanatos and Macaria their lives; she had killed them just as much as Musaeus had and guilt weighed heavily on her soul.

It wasn’t simply the emotional realization of the consequences of even her most minor mistakes that sent her reeling, but the loss of the Death couple, especially Thanatos. Of the Moirai, Atropos was the closest to him, there was no question of that. Thanatos had already been ancient when the Fates had been newly born and their existence had brought subtle, potent changes to the new world era coming into being with the Olympian reign. Before the creation of man, Thanatos had not had much work, but he had been free to take whatever souls he pleased on his own time though he never abused the power. When it had become clear what role in the cosmos the Fates were born to do, Thanatos had willingly ceded his prerogative of choice to Atropos and in return, she had provided structure to his disorganized life.

In her grieving contemplation of the god who had given her so much, Atropos remembered he had also taught her the importance of death to mortals and emphasized the relief it offered as a balm against the hardships of life. Losing him and being required to work with the new Thanatos made her realize how good he and Macaria had been at their job and, consequently, how much she had taken them for granted. Musaeus still had moral quandaries he grappled with from his mortal life, but Thanatos had none. He had accomplished his work with efficient kindness, not unaffected, but unwavering nevertheless. Atropos, immortal as she was, had never suffered life’s hardships and, unlike Thanatos, was not exposed to them and could not empathize with humans. Like everything else, she only knew of the hardships through the reading of the threads, never feeling them herself.

Grieving for loved ones was unknown to her and she began to ask herself questions she had never thought to ask before. First Clotho had died, now Thanatos and Macaria too, and she felt herself ill-equipped to cope with her loss, but humans suffered this loss constantly. They lost friends and family alike, but they still had to carry on living despite their loved ones’ absence. It was a fact of life, but one Atropos appreciated in a new light. Life was hard, full of misery and loss, but still they persevered and they triumphed, finding joy and light wherever they could. How could Atropos claim she was superior to them when three personal deaths had knocked her down so completely? She had no right to end mortal lives if she didn’t have the strength to overcome the despair she felt from her own losses.

And then a thought occurred to her. If she was unfit to continue the work of Atropos, perhaps she could go the way of Clotho and pass the mantle on to a mortal who was better suited for it than herself. Perhaps she _should_. Perhaps it was _time_ to make way for new blood and allow more sympathetic eyes to dictate when mortal lives should end. Atropos knew she would not live long once she was mortal. When Clotho had begun her mortal life, her physical appearance had become her actual age, but she had been a youthful woman. Atropos’s physical appearance was that of an old woman and that would be that would be her assumed physical age. Mortal life did not interest her as it had Clotho, only her devotion to the work of the Tapestry and the desire to remove her own poor performance from it was directing her to take this course. She hated the idea of leaving Lachesis behind, but as they had already discussed with Clotho long ago, the work of the Fates was too important to leave undone. Even worse was to do it with imperfect effort.

Atropos had come to this conclusion some three months after the new Thanatos had begun his Office, but she did not share any of these thoughts with her one remaining sister or the current Clotho for a long time. She guarded them jealously, but took a slightly greater interest than usual in the still-living threads of old women, though it was not enough to rouse the other Fates’ overt curiosity. Her remorse had not dulled her sensibility. Adjusting to a new Thanatos and the new system for classification of souls was enough of stress on everyone involved without having to train a new Atropos at the same time. She patiently bided her time, enjoying her limited time remaining with Lachesis and gathering together a potential list of candidates, until at last Thanatos was reasonably confident and secure in his office.

When she saw this, Atropos turned to the other two Fates and told them in a grave voice, “Clotho was the eternal beginning and I am the eternal ending. Now my time has come to an end as well.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another of the Fates has transferred, the Offices are just starting to be called Incarnations with a capital 'I', and Clotho unwittingly starts the precedent for being a romantic liaison to other Incarnations.


End file.
